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Self-Portrait with Cigarette meme template

Edvard Munch · 1895

Self-Portrait with Cigarette face swap

Munch dissolving at the edges, two years after he painted the scream.

Self-Portrait with Cigarette, as painted Self-Portrait with Cigarette with a different face swapped into it
An example: another painting's face. Yours goes on the right.

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How it works

  1. Take a photo

    Front camera, decent light, look straight ahead. Or pick one you already have.

  2. We paint you in

    Your face goes into the painting, keeping its light and its brushwork. About fifteen seconds.

  3. Share the link

    You get a page anyone can open. No account, nothing to install.

Where this one comes from

Munch painted this in 1895, when he was thirty-one and showing work in Kristiania that got him denounced in the newspapers. The hand holding the cigarette is barely there, the body fades into the dark, and the only solid things in the picture are the face and the smoke. It went into the Norwegian national collection in Oslo in 1909, bought while he was still alive and still being argued about.

What is in the picture

He stands in a blue-green fog with the light coming from somewhere below, which is the lighting of a stage rather than a room and throws the whole face wrong. The cigarette is at chest height and the smoke goes up past his jaw. The edges of the coat and the hand have been brushed out into the background so that the figure is coming apart at the periphery while the eyes stay in focus. Nothing in the picture is stable except the look.

When people use it

For a bad week you are not hiding. It suits the late-night post, the admission that things are not fine, and any caption that would be worse if it were cheerful.

How your face lands in it

Light from below and a dark surround, which is the least ordinary lighting in this catalogue. A photograph lit from above will still work, but the result carries the painting’s upward light and looks stranger than the photograph you put in. That strangeness is the reason to pick this one.

Self-Portrait with Cigarette — Edvard Munch, 1895. The painting dates from 1895 and Edvard Munch died in 1944, so it is in the public domain both in Norway and in the United States, where anything published this long ago is free. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits

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Questions

Is this the man who painted The Scream?

The same, two years later. The Scream dates from 1893, and by 1895 he was notorious across Scandinavia and Germany, with exhibitions being closed early and critics writing about mental illness rather than painting.

Why is the light coming from below?

It is deliberate, and it is theatrical lighting — footlights. Lit from underneath, an ordinary face reads as unsettling, and he used the effect in several pictures from these years.

What happened to him later?

He had a breakdown in 1908, spent months in a Copenhagen clinic, and afterwards painted in a brighter and calmer register for another thirty-five years. He died in Norway in 1944 under German occupation.

Is it free?

Yes. There is a limit on how many you can make in a day, and sharing one earns the allowance back.

Do you keep my photo?

No. Your selfie is used to make the image and then dropped — it is never written to disk. The finished meme is stored, because it has a link people can open, and it is deleted after 90 days.

Can I use someone else’s face?

Please do not. Use your own. Putting a real person into a picture they did not agree to is exactly the thing this is not for.

Can I post the result?

Yes, anywhere you like. The paintings are public domain; what you make with your own face is yours.