FaceApp puts smiles on Rijksmuseum portraits in viral social media trend

British graphic designer and illustrator Ollie Gibbs, visiting Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum with his girlfriend, noticed that the museum's portrait collection—spanning the Renaissance, Baroque, and Realism—depicted uniformly somber faces: sad expressions, dull gazes, furrowed brows, and never a smile. Jokingly attributing this to the tedium of sitting for hours, Gibbs used FaceApp, a mobile image application that alters facial expressions and features, to digitally add smiles to the painted figures. The results ranged from amusing and natural to unsettling, with beaming 32-tooth grins transforming the artworks. Gibbs shared the images online, where they went viral, spreading rapidly via retweets and shares. The Rijksmuseum itself joined in, tweeting from its official account: "Fun to see such familiar faces laughing!" Gibbs subsequently released GIFs and ironic captions capitalizing on the trend. The phenomenon echoes a similar earlier Italian series, "Se i quadri potessero parlare" (If Paintings Could Speak), created by Apulian student Stefano Guerrera, which placed witty captions (often in Roman dialect) on mythological, historical, and religious paintings. Guerrera's Facebook page now boasts over 1.2 million fans, compared to the Rijksmuseum's 332,653. The article notes that such lighthearted mockery of famous artworks is a popular pastime, with no conceptual or intellectual pretensions—just pure entertainment in the age of social media.