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The Laughing Cavalier meme template

Frans Hals · 1624

The Laughing Cavalier face swap

Enormous hat, enormous confidence, and a moustache doing most of the talking. Your face, his energy.

The Laughing Cavalier, as painted The Laughing Cavalier with a different face swapped into it
An example: another painting's face. Yours goes on the right.

or

Under 15 seconds · no sign-up · your selfie is never stored

How it works

  1. Take a photo

    Front camera, decent light, look straight ahead. Or pick one you already have.

  2. We paint you in

    Your face goes into the painting, keeping its light and its brushwork. About fifteen seconds.

  3. Share the link

    You get a page anyone can open. No account, nothing to install.

Where this one comes from

Frans Hals painted this unnamed twenty-six-year-old in Haarlem in 1624. The sitter is not actually laughing and was never called a cavalier; a Victorian exhibition gave the painting its nickname more than two centuries later and it stuck.

What is in the picture

Almost half the picture is clothing, and Hals painted it to be read: gold and silver embroidery running up the sleeve in bees, arrows, flaming cornucopias and lovers' knots — emblems of love and luck — under a lace collar the size of a dinner plate. Top right, in the artist's hand, is the only biography the sitter has: his age, twenty-six, and the year, 1624. His name was never written down.

When people use it

This is the look of someone who has just been proved right and intends to enjoy it. It fits the reply that lands after a long argument, the moment a risky plan works, and every occasion where the polite response would be to say nothing.

How your face lands in it

The hat and the moustache do most of the work, and only one of them is yours to keep. The brim tips low over one eyebrow and throws a real shadow across the forehead, so a photo taken in flat, even light lands better than one already lit hard from above. The head leans back a few degrees, and that small backward tilt is the entire attitude of the painting — it arrives whether you pose for it or not.

The Laughing Cavalier — Frans Hals, 1624. The artist died in 1666, so the work is in the public domain worldwide, and a faithful photograph of a flat public-domain painting carries no new copyright. Source

Also in: Paintings · Baroque · Dutch Golden Age

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All 105 paintings →

Questions

What is all the embroidery for?

Every motif on the sleeve is about love and luck — bees, arrows, flaming horns of plenty, lovers' knots, winged staffs. The usual reading is that the portrait was painted around the sitter's betrothal, which would also explain why a twenty-six-year-old commissioned anything this expensive.

Do I keep my own moustache?

Yes. Facial hair comes through with your face, so the painting hands you the hat, the collar and the embroidery and leaves the upper lip entirely to you.

Who was he?

Nobody knows. The inscription gives his age and the year and stops there, and no document has ever been tied to the face — unusual, because a man who could pay Hals this much was normally somebody a Dutch city kept records about.

Is it free?

Yes. There is a limit on how many you can make in a day, and sharing one earns the allowance back.

Do you keep my photo?

No. Your selfie is used to make the image and then dropped — it is never written to disk. The finished meme is stored, because it has a link people can open, and it is deleted after 90 days.

Can I use someone else’s face?

Please do not. Use your own. Putting a real person into a picture they did not agree to is exactly the thing this is not for.

Can I post the result?

Yes, anywhere you like. The paintings are public domain; what you make with your own face is yours.