Henry VIII face swap

Where this one comes from

Holbein painted this around 1537, after a decade as the man English power went to for a likeness. The king is in his mid-forties, three years past the break with Rome and in the year his only legitimate son was finally born. Holbein is the reason a man dead five centuries still has a face everybody can draw: no other English monarch was fixed this completely by a single painter.

What is in the picture

A blue ground, and everything in front of it cost money: a flat black cap trimmed with ostrich feather and set with pearls and gold, a collar of gold scrollwork, a chain of rubies and white enamel, and a doublet embroidered black on cream. The head is turned slightly to his right and the eyes are not. It is a small panel, under a foot high, made to be looked at closely by people who already knew what he could do.

When people use it

It is the face of holding every card and having stopped pretending otherwise. It fits the reply that opens with 'as I said in my previous email', the person who booked the restaurant and will therefore be choosing, and any photograph taken immediately after somebody got their own way.

How your face lands in it

The cap sits back off the forehead and the face is close to square-on, so a straightforward front-lit photo is the right one here. His beard stays, your jaw arrives as it is, and it barely matters either way: the recognition in this picture is carried by the hat and the collar rather than by the face underneath them.

Portrait of Henry VIII — Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1537. The artist died in 1543, so the painting is in the public domain worldwide, and a faithful photograph of a flat public-domain painting carries no new copyright of its own. Source

Also in: Paintings · Renaissance · Royal portraits · Tudor portraits