Joshua Reynolds face swap

Where this one comes from

Reynolds painted this around 1780 for the Royal Academy, which he had presided over since its founding in 1768 and where he delivered a lecture every year on what painting ought to be. He is wearing the scarlet robes of an Oxford doctorate awarded in 1773. Behind him is a bust of Michelangelo, whose name is the last word of the last of those lectures. He was deaf, and had been since catching a chill in the Vatican as a young man.

What is in the picture

Scarlet and black academic robes, a soft cap, a scroll in one hand, and the white plaster head of Michelangelo in the shadow behind his shoulder. He is turned three-quarters with the light falling across the near side of the face. The paint in the robes is thick and worked; the face is glazed and smooth. Reynolds experimented constantly with bitumen and unstable varnishes, and a great many of his pictures have darkened or cracked because of it.

When people use it

For institutional seriousness applied to yourself. It suits a graduation, a promotion, an appointment to a committee, and any joke about taking on a title.

How your face lands in it

A three-quarter head lit from the front left, with the cap set back and no hair crossing the face. Reliable. The robes carry the whole meaning of the picture and none of them changes, so whatever you upload comes back as an academic with a Michelangelo on the shelf.

Self-portrait — Sir Joshua Reynolds, c. 1780. Joshua Reynolds died in 1792, so the painting has been in the public domain for over two centuries and the photograph of it carries no separate rights. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits