Portrait of an Unknown Woman face swap

Where this one comes from

Kramskoi exhibited this in 1883 and refused to say who she was, which is why the title is what it is. She sits in an open carriage on the Anichkov Bridge in St Petersburg, dressed expensively in a way that respectable society read as improper, and contemporary critics were rude about her without knowing anything. Nobody has since established a name. It is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

What is in the picture

Velvet, satin ribbons, ostrich feather, fur, kid gloves, gold bracelet: every item in the picture is expensive, and putting them all on one woman in an open carriage was precisely the provocation. The head is tipped slightly back so she looks at you along her cheekbones. Behind her the winter city dissolves into grey mist and the palace roofline barely resolves. The face is painted with enormous finish; everything else is loose.

When people use it

For looking down at something from a height. It is the best available face for cool dismissal, and it suits anybody replying to a comment they consider beneath them.

How your face lands in it

The head is tilted back and turned, which is the least common angle in this catalogue and the reason the finished picture carries so much attitude regardless of the expression you supply. Light is flat and cold. The fur hat frames the face tightly on three sides and stays, so bring a photograph where your hairline is not doing anything unusual.

Portrait of an Unknown Woman — Ivan Kramskoi, 1883. Ivan Kramskoi died in 1887, so the painting has long been in the public domain, and a straight photographic reproduction of it carries no rights of its own. Source

Also in: Paintings · Oil portraits