Margaret van Eyck face swap

Where this one comes from

Van Eyck painted his wife Margaret in 1439, two years before he died. Nobody commissioned it: the panel stayed in the household, and it is one of the earliest independent portraits of an ordinary married woman in European art — not a saint, not a donor kneeling in the corner of an altarpiece, just a wife. The original frame carries her age, thirty-three, and his motto. It is in Bruges, in the Groeningemuseum.

What is in the picture

A horned headdress of pleated white linen, a red wool dress trimmed with grey fur, and a face with no flattery applied anywhere. The hairline is plucked high in the fashion of the decade, the chin is doubled, the eyes are slightly asymmetrical, and Van Eyck recorded all of it at the same magnification he gave to a duke. The hands are folded at the lower edge. There is no landscape, no symbolism to decode and nothing to work out; it is a picture of somebody he saw every day.

When people use it

For the look you get when you have said something for the third time. It is a domestic face rather than a ceremonial one, which makes it unusually good for jokes about people who live with you.

How your face lands in it

The linen headdress boxes the face in on both sides and above, and the light is flat and frontal, which together make this among the most reliable swaps on the site. Your own face shape comes through strongly because there is no hair at all in the picture to disguise it. Keep the expression plain — the original is not performing and a big smile reads as out of place.

Portrait of Margaret van Eyck — Jan van Eyck, 1439. Jan van Eyck died in 1441. The painting has been in the public domain for centuries, and the photographic reproduction of a flat work that old carries no new copyright. Source

Also in: Paintings · Medieval portraits