Mademoiselle Rivière face swap

Where this one comes from

Ingres was twenty-five and still unknown when he showed this at the Paris Salon of 1806 alongside portraits of the girl’s parents. The critics disliked all three, calling the style archaic and stiff, and he left for Rome partly because of the reception. Caroline Rivière was about fifteen when she sat, and she died within roughly a year of the picture being finished. It hangs in the Louvre.

What is in the picture

A white empire-line dress, long gloves to the elbow, and an enormous stole of swan’s down looped over both arms, against a low green river landscape under a pale sky. The head is an almost perfect oval and the neck is drawn longer than a neck goes, which is the mannerism that his contemporaries objected to and that later painters admired him for. The face gives nothing away. Knowing when she died changes how the picture reads, and it is hard to unlearn.

When people use it

For a composed front held over something else entirely. It suits the polite photo taken at an event you did not want to attend, and any caption about keeping it together.

How your face lands in it

A cleanly outlined frontal head against open sky, evenly lit, with dark hair curling close on both sides and nothing crossing the features. Very reliable. The elongation of the neck belongs to the painting, not to the face, so it survives the swap and keeps the strangeness that makes the picture what it is.

Mademoiselle Rivière — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1806. The painter died in 1867, which places the work in the public domain in France and the United States, and a faithful photograph of it gains no new copyright. Source

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