Juan de Pareja face swap

Where this one comes from

Velazquez made this in Rome in 1650 to get his hand back in before painting the pope, and hung it in the Pantheon that March, where by every account it took the attention of the city. The sitter was Juan de Pareja, who had been enslaved in the painter’s household for years and was a painter himself. Velazquez signed the papers granting him his freedom in Rome the same year.

What is in the picture

A man in a worn grey doublet and a wide collar of Flemish lace, turned a little off the front, meeting your eye without any of the furniture a portrait normally gives a sitter: no table, no column, no crest, nothing behind him but air. The paint is fast and thin, and the lace is a handful of white strokes that fall apart under your nose and are exact from three paces. What the picture is really about is the steadiness of the expression, which is not a pose anyone had painted on a servant before.

When people use it

For standing your ground. It suits the moment when the right move is to say nothing more and keep looking, and it is the picture for having been underestimated by somebody who has just worked that out.

How your face lands in it

His face sits just off the front, lit from high on the left against a flat neutral ground, so there is a clean edge all round and nothing in the background arguing with it. Your own colouring comes through undiluted, because there is almost no other colour in the picture to fight. A calm photograph with the mouth closed matches best — every bit of the force here is in a pair of eyes that are not moving.

Portrait of Juan de Pareja — Diego Velazquez, 1650. Diego Velazquez died in 1660, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries, and the photographic reproduction of a flat work that old carries no separate rights. Source

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