Madame Moitessier face swap

Where this one comes from

Ingres did not want the commission. He took it in 1844 after meeting the banker’s wife and deciding she was worth painting, then spent twelve years failing to finish, restarting, and changing the dress. The seated version was signed in 1856 and hangs in the National Gallery in London. Her pose — hand raised with a finger against the temple — is lifted from a Roman fresco dug out of Herculaneum.

What is in the picture

A dress of flowered silk that occupies half the canvas, a divan, a gilt frame, a fan, bracelets, and a woman resting her cheek against one hand. Behind her a mirror shows the back of her head and neck in profile — an angle you could not actually see from where she is sitting, which nobody minds. Ingres finished skin until no brush mark survives anywhere on it, and the result is a face that looks lit from inside and not entirely made of flesh.

When people use it

For being extremely comfortable and slightly bored by the whole thing. It is the right picture for waiting out somebody else’s explanation, and for replies that consist of one raised eyebrow.

How your face lands in it

A large, softly lit, almost frontal head with the hand and fingers coming up against the cheek on one side. The fingers stay, so your face arrives already holding that gesture. The original skin is porcelain-smooth and shadowless, which means a flash photograph with hard edges reads as inserted; something taken in diffuse daylight sits in far better.

Madame Moitessier — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1856. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres died in 1867, so the painting entered the public domain long ago and the gallery’s photograph of it carries no separate rights. Source

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