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Louis XVI meme template

Antoine-Francois Callet · c. 1779

Louis XVI face swap

The official state portrait of a king, sent out in copies, fourteen years before the guillotine.

Louis XVI, as painted Louis XVI with a different face swapped into it
An example: another painting's face. Yours goes on the right.

or

Under 15 seconds · no sign-up · your selfie is never stored

How it works

  1. Take a photo

    Front camera, decent light, look straight ahead. Or pick one you already have.

  2. We paint you in

    Your face goes into the painting, keeping its light and its brushwork. About fifteen seconds.

  3. Share the link

    You get a page anyone can open. No account, nothing to install.

Where this one comes from

Antoine-Francois Callet painted this in 1778 or 1779 as the official image of Louis XVI in coronation dress, and its job was to be copied. Versions went to embassies, ministries and provincial halls all over France and abroad, which is how a face became a government. The king was in his mid-twenties. In January 1793 the same man was executed in what is now the Place de la Concorde.

What is in the picture

Ermine, blue velvet sewn with gold fleurs-de-lis, a collar of the Order of the Holy Spirit, a sword, a crown on a cushion, a column, a curtain: the full inventory of French monarchy arranged around a young man with a soft, pleasant, faintly uncertain face. Callet was very good at cloth and only adequate at people, and the imbalance is instructive — you are looking at several kilograms of institution with a person somewhere inside it.

When people use it

For maximum formality applied to something trivial. The gap between the ermine and whatever you are actually announcing is the entire joke, and it gets funnier the smaller the news.

How your face lands in it

The head is small relative to the canvas because the robes take so much room, so use a sharp photograph taken in decent light. It is front-facing and evenly lit, with the wig curled clear of the ears and touching nothing. Everything that says king is below the neck and stays, which is why this template does so much with so little help from you.

Louis XVI, roi de France et de Navarre — Antoine-Francois Callet, c. 1779. Antoine-Francois Callet died in 1823, so the painting has been in the public domain in Europe and the United States for well over a century. Source

Also in: Paintings · Royal portraits

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Questions

What is he wearing?

The grand costume royal: ermine-lined blue velvet embroidered in gold, the collar of the Saint-Esprit — the senior French chivalric order — and the coronation sword known as the Joyeuse. The crown is beside him on a cushion rather than on his head.

Why were there so many copies?

Because that was the function. An official royal portrait was reproduced by workshops and distributed to institutions across the kingdom and to foreign courts, so that everyone dealing with the French state was looking at the same face.

How old was he?

Twenty-four or twenty-five. He had come to the throne in 1774 at nineteen and would be deposed in 1792 and executed in January 1793 at thirty-eight.

Is it free?

Yes. There is a limit on how many you can make in a day, and sharing one earns the allowance back.

Do you keep my photo?

No. Your selfie is used to make the image and then dropped — it is never written to disk. The finished meme is stored, because it has a link people can open, and it is deleted after 90 days.

Can I use someone else’s face?

Please do not. Use your own. Putting a real person into a picture they did not agree to is exactly the thing this is not for.

Can I post the result?

Yes, anywhere you like. The paintings are public domain; what you make with your own face is yours.