![]() ![]() These were remarkable paintings for their time, but they were not made with Tumblr or Twitter in mind. ![]() Afterward, he returned and, through his friendship with David, resumed his career as a portrait painter, as well as an eccentric self-portraitist, an avocation he’d taken up in the 1780s and 90s to satisfy his curiosity about the theory of physiognomy, a pseudoscience that attempted to divine a person’s character and personality from their facial expressions and bodily postures. Ducreux worked alongside such masters as Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Jacques-Louis David, despite the fact that he was not a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, unheard of at the time for a court painter.ĭuring the French Revolution, Ducreux hid out in London, where he made the last portrait of Louis XVI before the king’s beheading. This was an honor not given to any old slouch. Within a couple years, Steve Buscemi’s face got photoshopped in place of the grinning bon vivant, and the meme began its decline.īut whose face was it, pre-Buscemi, giving us that toothy grin and point, “like a man catching sight of an old friend across a crowded room,” the Public Domain Review writes, “or a politician trying to charm a voter.” The gentleman in question, in fact, happened to be the artist, Joseph Ducreux, a highly skilled oil painter whose miniature of Marie Antoinette in 1769 won him a baronetcy and the title of primer peintre de la reine (First Painter to the Queen). We all know him, the dapper cross between a smarmy office bro and smug, pull-my-finger uncle leaning on his walking stick, hat pushed back at a rakish angle, pointing at the viewer with a leer.… The 18th-century painting, titled Self-Portrait in the Guise of a Mocker, enjoyed a brief but rich second life for a couple years as a 21st century meme, first appearing online in a 2009 image macro with the caption “Disregard Females, Acquire Currency,” an overly stuffy, thus hilarious, rephrasing of Notorious B.I.G.’s “Get Money” lyrics.
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