Rembrandt's Self-Portrait face swap

Where this one comes from

Rembrandt painted this in 1659, three years after his belongings were sold off to settle his debts. He painted himself dozens of times across his life, and the late ones are famous for refusing to flatter: the light finds every line, and the expression neither apologises nor performs.

What is in the picture

One light source, high and to the left, and Rembrandt lets it do the entire job: the forehead, nose and one cheek are built up in thick worked paint, while the other half of the face falls away into a brown that the coat and the background disappear into as well. Down in the dark on the left are his signature and the date. He was fifty-three, three years past the sale of everything he owned.

When people use it

It is the face of having been through the week. It fits the photo taken at the end of a long shift, the reply sent at two in the morning, and any moment where the only honest answer to 'how's it going' is a look.

How your face lands in it

This one is about light rather than features. The lit side of the face is modelled in heavy paint with every line kept, so a photo taken in soft directional light — a window off to one side — lands much closer than a flat frontal flash, which gives the painting's shadow nothing to grab. Age is not required: the beret, the fur and the brown do most of the work.

Self-Portrait — Rembrandt van Rijn, 1659. The artist died in 1669, 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 · Baroque · Dutch Golden Age