Bearded Man with a Ruff face swap

Where this one comes from

Frans Hals painted this in 1625, in the middle of the decade that made him the portraitist every prosperous household in Haarlem wanted. He worked fast and left the marks of it on the surface, which his contemporaries found startling and his customers evidently did not mind. The sitter is unidentified, which is true of a great many of his pictures: the ruff and the black cloth say everything that needed saying at the time.

What is in the picture

The ruff is a cartwheel of starched linen the width of the shoulders, and it took a specialist and a set of heated irons to set. Hals painted it in confident diagonal strokes that are visible as strokes and add up to linen anyway. Above it the face is ruddy and slightly amused, the beard is a scribble of grey and brown, and the whole head is lit from the upper left in one pass. Nothing is blended. That was the scandal and it is the reason he still looks modern.

When people use it

For being briskly unimpressed. It is a good general-purpose reaction face, and it works particularly well where somebody has just explained something at length that could have been one sentence.

How your face lands in it

The ruff draws a hard white circle directly under the chin, which crops the result cleanly and stops it from drifting into the dark clothing. The face is three-quarters on and evenly lit. The beard is substantial and remains, and the loose paint elsewhere means a slightly soft photograph fits in better here than in the tightly finished panels.

Portrait of a Bearded Man with a Ruff — Frans Hals, 1625. Frans Hals died in 1666, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries, and the photograph of a flat work of that age carries no rights of its own. Source

Also in: Paintings · Baroque · Dutch Golden Age