Malle Babbe face swap

Where this one comes from

Frans Hals painted this around 1640. The name written on the back of the panel, Malle Babbe, means something like Mad Babbe, and a woman recorded as Barbara Claes was living in the Haarlem workhouse in those years — an institution that held the destitute, the drunk and the mentally ill together. Courbet came across the picture in Munich in 1869 and stopped to copy it. It is in Berlin.

What is in the picture

She is caught mid-laugh with her head thrown round and her mouth wide, a large pewter tankard in one hand, and an owl sitting on her shoulder — in Dutch, to be drunk as an owl. The paint is the fastest Hals ever applied: the cap and collar are a handful of white slashes, the face is built out of streaks of pink and grey that do not blend, and the whole picture looks as though it was finished before she could move.

When people use it

For laughing at something that is not funny. It is the most unruly picture in this catalogue and the only one that suits a caption written in capitals.

How your face lands in it

A wide-open laughing mouth, a head turned hard on the shoulders, and the roughest paint surface in the catalogue. This one does not do subtle. A grinning photograph fits it and a solemn one comes out looking dubbed, so choose accordingly. The white cap frames the top of the head and stays where it is.

Malle Babbe — Frans Hals, c. 1640–1646. Frans Hals died in 1666, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries and a faithful reproduction of it acquires no new rights. Source

Also in: Paintings · Baroque · Dutch Golden Age