Portrait of a Young Woman face swap

Where this one comes from

Vermeer painted this around 1665, in the same years and at close to the same size as the far more famous head in The Hague, and with the same device: a plain dark ground, a single turned head, no story and no room. What it is, strictly, is a tronie: a study of a type or an expression, painted for the open market instead of ordered by the person in it. It is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

What is in the picture

A pale oval face over a white collar, a pearl at the ear, hair pulled back and mostly in shadow, and a background of flat dark nothing. The paint is thinner and the handling looser than in the Mauritshuis head, and the features are less resolved — the nose in particular barely exists as an edge. What it shares with its famous relative is the arrangement: a person turning towards you out of the dark, caught at the moment before they speak.

When people use it

For a look held a half-second too long. It suits the quiet reply, the one-word answer, and anything where the point is that you have not decided yet what you think.

How your face lands in it

A three-quarter head on a black ground with soft light from the left and no hair crossing the face. There is almost nothing in this picture except the head, so the swap is unusually direct and the result depends mostly on the photograph you bring. Since the original edges are deliberately soft, a very sharp photograph can sit slightly forward of the painting around it.

Portrait of a Young Woman — Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665. Johannes Vermeer died in 1675, which put the painting in the public domain centuries ago; a faithful photograph of it gains no new copyright. Source

Also in: Paintings · Baroque · Dutch Golden Age