Your photo as a Dutch Golden Age portrait
A canvas from the portrait studios of Holland in 1640, painted in the rough manner: strokes that knit into a face from a few paces off, one pool of warm light, and the rest in brown gloom.
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Nobody in the examples is a real person — the before photos are invented faces. These are our best results, not average ones. Sometimes AI can't handle it and modifies your face. All we can offer is a try.
How a Dutch Golden Age portrait was painted
The Dutch Republic had no court and its church commissioned nothing, so pictures were painted to be sold: at fairs, through dealers, out of the painter's front room. The group portrait became a civic genre in which each sitter paid for his own head, and its cousin the merry company crowded laughing faces up against the picture plane.
This craft is the rough manner of those studios. Plain linen is primed a warm mid-brown that stays visible wherever the picture is dark. The darks are thin transparent brown; the lights are stiff paste off a flat hog brush, each stroke laid once and left with its bristle track. One warm light falls from above and to one side in a single pool, and everything outside it sinks into gloom.
Erafy paints your photo on a tall canvas, the figure whole and small below a deep band of empty dark. The linen at the throat is a flat white falling collar, the dress of the 1630s to 1650s. A face is a few dozen strokes, no finer than the collar under it, that read as a face from several paces off. With Situation on, you may be at a card game over a barrel head or in a merry company round a lute player.
More pictures
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Music at home -
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Other crafts: Painted and printed
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Rococo1760 -
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Wood engraving1850 -
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Questions
Why is so much of the canvas dark?
Because in this school light ranks. One warm light falls in a single pool on the figures and the floor at their feet; whatever it does not reach has no light on it and sinks into a warm brown gloom in which the primed ground shows through. Depth is made of darkness and thin transparent paint, never of blur. Old varnish has since yellowed to amber and the darks have sunk further.
What was the Dutch Golden Age?
The seventeenth century in the Dutch Republic, when a trading country without a court bought pictures by the thousand. Landscape and still life became subjects in their own right, painters specialised in ships, church interiors or breakfast tables, and portraits were painted for guild halls, militia companies and front rooms. Erafy's version sits in the middle of it, about 1630 to 1660.
What would I look like in a Dutch Golden Age portrait?
Erafy makes a new picture from your photo in the style of the year you pick, so how much it resembles you varies from one go to the next. It varies most in the black-and-white years and in the crafts before 1900, where faces are drawn in the craft's style. We make no promise about how any result will look.
