Egon Schiele face swap

Where this one comes from

Schiele made this in 1912, when he was twenty-two. In April of that year he was arrested in a village outside Vienna, held for twenty-four days, and a judge burned one of his drawings in the courtroom; the charge of seducing a minor was dropped and he was convicted of displaying indecent material where children could see it. He died six years later in the influenza pandemic, three days after his pregnant wife, aged twenty-eight.

What is in the picture

A head against a flat wash of brown, with the neck and shoulders indicated in a few dry strokes and the paper left bare around them. The hair stands out from the skull in dark spikes. The face is built from green, ochre and red laid on almost unmixed — skin painted as a set of separate coloured patches rather than a single tone — and the eyes are outlined hard, which is the one thing every Schiele head has in common.

When people use it

For being visibly unwell about something. It is the rawest picture here, and it suits anything where a tidy version would be a lie.

How your face lands in it

An almost frontal face on an empty ground, well lit, with nothing crossing it: mechanically very simple. What it does to a photograph is not simple. The patchy unblended colour stays and the drawn outlines stay, so the result looks handled rather than photographed, more than with any other template here.

Self-portrait against a brown ground — Egon Schiele, 1912. Egon Schiele died in 1918, so the work has been in the public domain in Austria and the United States for many years and the reproduction is published on that basis. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits