Thomas Jefferson face swap

Where this one comes from

Rembrandt Peale painted this in Philadelphia in 1800, when he was twenty-two and Jefferson was vice-president in the middle of the ugliest election the young republic had yet held. Peale came from a family of painters named after painters — his father called his sons Rembrandt, Raphaelle, Rubens and Titian — and this is the best thing he ever did. Jefferson won the election a few months later.

What is in the picture

A fur-collared coat over a red waistcoat, with a high white stock at the throat, against a dark ground. The hair is reddish and lightly powdered. Peale lit the face from the front left and kept the paint thin and even, so the head sits forward out of the dark with very little drama applied to it — a straightforward, unheroic likeness of a man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and enslaved six hundred people over the course of his life.

When people use it

For a portrait taken at exactly the right moment in a career. It suits a new job, a campaign, and anything announced just before it is certain.

How your face lands in it

A large head, turned three-quarters and lit evenly from the left, against a plain dark ground and nothing crossing the face. Among the easiest in the catalogue and very high resolution, so a sharp photograph is rewarded here. The fur collar draws a soft line under the chin and keeps the result from bleeding into the background.

Thomas Jefferson — Rembrandt Peale, 1800. Rembrandt Peale died in 1860, so the painting has been in the public domain for well over a century and the Google Art Project reproduction is published on that basis. Source

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