Jan Six face swap

Where this one comes from

Rembrandt painted Jan Six in 1654. Six was a wealthy Amsterdam merchant, a poet, later a mayor of the city, and for a while Rembrandt’s friend and creditor — the painter’s finances were coming apart and Six had lent him money. The picture has never been sold. It is still owned by Six’s descendants in Amsterdam, in the same family for more than three hundred and seventy years.

What is in the picture

He is pulling on a glove. That is the entire action, and Rembrandt painted the hands and the glove so loosely that at close range they dissolve into slabs of grey and buff, while the gold braid on the red cloak is laid on in single flicks that do not resolve into braid at all. The face, by contrast, is finished. The picture works because a man is doing something ordinary and thinking about something else, and because the paint gets freer the further it travels from his eyes.

When people use it

For being halfway out of the door. It fits the person who is already leaving and has stopped to answer one more thing, and it works for any caption about not having time for this.

How your face lands in it

The head is angled slightly down and towards you, lit from the left, and it occupies a smaller share of the canvas than most portraits here because the body and the cloak take so much room. Bring a sharp photograph. The looseness everywhere else means your face becomes the most resolved thing in the picture, which is how Rembrandt arranged it in the first place.

Portrait of Jan Six — Rembrandt van Rijn, 1654. Rembrandt van Rijn died in 1669, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries and a flat reproduction of it carries no separate copyright. Source

Also in: Paintings · Baroque · Dutch Golden Age