Man in a Red Turban face swap

Where this one comes from

Jan van Eyck painted this in 1433 and signed the frame with the motto Als Ich Can — 'as best I can' — an unusually personal line that is part of why many scholars read the sitter as van Eyck himself. The headwear is a chaperon, folded and wound into the shape that later got it the nickname turban.

What is in the picture

Two thirds of the picture is red cloth. The chaperon is folded and wound into a shape with no obvious beginning, lit so that every crease holds its own value, and it sits above a face where van Eyck painted the bloodshot corners of the eyes and the stubble coming through the chin. The ground is black, the fur is nearly black, and the red has nowhere to go but forward.

When people use it

It is the face of unimpressed patience. People reach for it when a meeting reaches its fortieth minute, when a group chat rediscovers an argument it had last month, or when someone explains at length a thing you told them.

How your face lands in it

The headdress covers the skull completely and there is no hair anywhere in the picture, so nothing your own is doing reaches it. What comes through is the jaw and the eyes — and in this painting the eyes are pointed sideways at the viewer out of a head that is barely turned. The slight distrust everybody reads in it is a matter of eye direction, and it survives whatever expression you bring.

Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) — Jan van Eyck, 1433. The artist died in 1441, so the painting is in the public domain worldwide, and a faithful photograph of a flat public-domain painting carries no new copyright of its own. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits · Renaissance · Medieval portraits