Mary I face swap

Where this one comes from

Antonis Mor painted Mary Tudor in 1554, the year she married Philip of Spain, and he was sent from the Habsburg court to do it. Mary was thirty-eight, had been queen for a year, and was the first woman to rule England in her own right. The portrait went to Spain and is in the Prado; the reign it opens lasted five years and got her a nickname she has never lost.

What is in the picture

She sits in a high-backed chair in red velvet, holding a rose, with a large jewel at her breast — a table-cut diamond with a pearl below it, a betrothal gift from Philip. Mor painted in the Netherlandish manner: hard outlines, unflattering exactness, every line in the face reported. The result is a queen who looks less like a portrait than like a person you have been left alone in a room with, and the difference between this and English court painting of the same decade is the difference between description and decoration.

When people use it

For the decision taken against advice. It works wherever the caption is about doing the unpopular thing deliberately, and it is a very good face for refusing to explain yourself twice.

How your face lands in it

Frontal, upright, evenly lit, with the hood and the high collar drawing a closed shape round the head: an easy target, and one where the surrounding red does a lot of work for the finished image. Mor’s original is unusually literal about skin, so what comes out tends to look more like an actual photograph of a person than the smoother court portraits elsewhere on the site.

Mary I of England — Antonis Mor, 1554. Antonis Mor died around 1577, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries and the photograph of it carries no additional rights. Source

Also in: Paintings · Royal portraits · Tudor portraits