Your photo as a Holbein Tudor portrait
Erafy paints you as the court painted its sitters in 1535: half length on an oak board, against one flat field of colour, the cloth exact and the face still.
AI photo app · Free to download · iPhone · 18+
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.
What a Tudor portrait was
At the English court from 1526, a portrait was made in two stages. First a drawing in black and coloured chalks on paper given a pink flesh ground, done in front of the sitter: the contour, the placing of the features, a flat pass of red for a cheek. Then the sitter went away. A large group of those sheets survives at Windsor.
The panel was worked up from that sheet alone: oil on a jointed oak board, thin glazes polished to an enamel surface with no brushstroke in it. Behind the sitter sits one flat field of blue, green or gold. Velvet, fur, linen and a gold chain are described thread by thread and link by link, while the face carries only what is permanent: the brow, the set of the eyes, the line of the nose, the jaw, the colouring.
Erafy makes a board from your photo: half length, close to the picture plane, turned a little off frontal, the mouth closed and the gaze level. The crack net of the varnish runs through the face as it runs through the cloth. With Situation on you may be at a game of chess or at a pair of virginals.
A century on, the Dutch Golden Age portrait is all visible strokes.
More pictures
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With carnations -
A couple -
A white bunny as a person
Other crafts: Painted and printed
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Rococo1760 -
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Wood engraving1850 -
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Questions
Who was Holbein?
Hans Holbein the Younger, a painter from Basel who worked at the English court from 1526 to 1543. His sitters were merchants, courtiers and the royal household, and his method, a chalk study from life and then a panel worked up from that sheet, is what this craft follows.
Why is the background one flat colour?
Because the field behind a Tudor sitter was a plain saturated colour, blue, green or gold, with nothing in it and no shadow thrown onto it. The things that said who the sitter was, a ring, a letter, a book, sat beside the figure instead. In Erafy the field stays flat and the figure is cut against it by a hard clean edge.
What would I look like as a Tudor 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.
