Portrait of a Young Girl face swap

Where this one comes from

Petrus Christus became the leading painter in Bruges after Jan van Eyck died, and this small panel from about 1470 is the one that fixed his reputation. The sitter is unknown; an old guess attaches her to an English family living in the city. It is in the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin and is barely larger than a postcard.

What is in the picture

She sits in the corner of a real room, the wall meeting a strip of panelling behind her shoulder, at a moment when almost nobody was doing that: portraits of the decade still floated their heads in flat black nothing. The tall dark hennin is pinned with a band of gold, and three rows of a black-and-gold necklace lie along the collarbone. Her eyes slide sideways without the head following, and the effect is of a person told to hold still who is holding still on her own terms.

When people use it

The look you give across a table when somebody says something remarkable and you have decided not to be the one who responds. It works on any screenshot where the point is that you heard it and said nothing at all.

How your face lands in it

Her face is close to frontal, evenly lit, and takes up nearly a third of a very small picture, so there is more to work with here than the panel size suggests. The hennin draws a hard dark outline over the top of your head and keeps the edges tidy. The glance belongs to the eyes in the original, so it leaves when your eyes arrive; look off to one side in your photograph if you want to keep it.

Portrait of a Young Girl — Petrus Christus, c. 1470. Petrus Christus died in 1475 or 1476, so the work predates copyright entirely; the Wikimedia Commons photograph of it is published as public domain for the same reason. Source

Also in: Paintings · Medieval portraits