Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat face swap

Where this one comes from

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun painted this after seeing a Rubens portrait whose daylight she wanted to reproduce, and answered it with herself in a feathered straw hat under an open sky. She was portraitist to Marie Antoinette and one of the very few women admitted to the French academy, and the picture is her arguing for both her skill and her ease.

What is in the picture

She is outdoors — blue sky, a bank of grey and pink cloud — and that was the argument: a portrait lit by daylight rather than by a studio, painted after a Rubens she had seen and wanted to answer. The straw brim shades the top half of the face while the sky bounces light back up into it. Low in the frame she holds a fistful of brushes and a palette with the colours still wet.

When people use it

It is the shorthand for a day that went well and a person who knows it. It suits the holiday photo posted three weeks after the holiday, the first warm afternoon of the year, and any picture taken in light so good it deserves credit as a co-author.

How your face lands in it

The brim lays a soft horizontal shadow across the forehead and leaves the eyes and mouth in bounced light, which is a flattering arrangement and also a specific one — a photo shot under a hard overhead lamp will fight it. Her own loose curls frame the face closely on both sides, so this one sits best on a picture taken from the front with nothing covering the hairline.

Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat — Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, after 1782. The artist died in 1842, so the painting is in the public domain worldwide, and a faithful photograph of a flat public-domain painting carries no new copyright of its own. Source

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