Ter Borch: Portrait of a Man face swap

Where this one comes from

Gerard ter Borch spent most of his career in Deventer, a long way from the Amsterdam art trade, painting small pictures for people who could afford to look at them closely. This one is late, from the last years before his death in 1681, and it is in the national gallery in Copenhagen. His most famous work is not a portrait at all but a group of seventy-odd tiny faces on a sheet of copper, recording the oath that ended the Eighty Years’ War.

What is in the picture

Black, white and grey, and almost nothing else. A plain collar, a dark coat, hair to the shoulders, and a wall behind with no feature on it whatever. Ter Borch built a reputation on painting fabric — white satin in particular, which he rendered so convincingly that collectors bought his pictures for the dresses — and then spent his portraits proving he could get the same result with no colour to work with.

When people use it

For understatement. It is the face for a modest announcement, a small correction, or the moment you decide not to make a thing of it.

How your face lands in it

A near-frontal head in low, even, undramatic light against a plain grey ground. Technically one of the easiest pictures here and one of the quietest. There is nothing in the frame to carry the result, no hat, no jewellery, no costume to speak of, so what comes back is your own face in a seventeenth-century collar and very little else.

Portrait of a Man — Gerard ter Borch, c. 1679. Gerard ter Borch died in 1681, so the painting has been in the public domain for centuries, and the museum publishes its photograph of it as public domain. Source

Also in: Paintings · Baroque · Dutch Golden Age