Judith Leyster face swap

Where this one comes from

Judith Leyster painted herself around 1630 in Haarlem, in her early twenties, and used the picture as a calling card: she was admitted to the painters’ guild there in 1633, one of a very small number of women ever to be. After her death her paintings were quietly reassigned to Frans Hals and stayed under his name for two hundred years, until a monogram was noticed during a lawsuit in 1893 and the whole body of work had to be handed back to her.

What is in the picture

She has swung round in the chair with a brush in one hand and eighteen more plus a palette in the other, and on the easel behind her is a grinning fiddler — a figure from one of her own genre scenes, painted inside her own portrait. The white collar is enormous and the paint in it moves fast and loosely, which is exactly the Haarlem manner that later let people mistake her for Hals. Her mouth is open as if she has just been interrupted and does not mind.

When people use it

For being caught enjoying your own work. It is the picture for the message sent while you are still mid-task and pleased with how it is going, and it survives being used sincerely.

How your face lands in it

Her face is close to the front, well lit, and framed underneath by the broad flat white of the collar, which makes a bright shelf that holds the finished result together. Note that the original mouth is slightly open and smiling: this is one of the few pictures on the site where a photograph of you actually grinning is the closer match, and a stern one looks out of place.

Self-Portrait — Judith Leyster, c. 1630. Judith Leyster died in 1660, which puts the painting in the public domain many times over, and the Google Art Project photograph of it is published as public domain. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits · Baroque · Dutch Golden Age