Bizarre Selfies of Joseph Ducreux—The Meme Lord

A Royal Commission

After France ceded its territories in North America to Great Britain, the country’s morale and economy were at their lowest point. Nevertheless, Étienne François, Duc de Choiseul, had a plan to restore France’s prestige: an arranged marriage between the future Louis XVI and the Austrian Archduchess, Marie Antoinette. The secret royal matchmaking began in 1766, and soon the young Louis became curious about his future bride.

In an era without cameras, the only way to satisfy his curiosity was through a portrait. However, the pocket-sized miniatures sent by the Austrians failed to impress him, he wanted to see the princess life-sized. And so, with France’s political future hanging on a single portrait, Joseph Ducreux enters the picture.

Who Was Joseph Ducreux?

Born in Nancy on June 26, 1735, Joseph Ducreux took his first steps into the world of art under the guidance of his father. In 1760, he moved to Paris, where he trained as the sole pupil of the renowned pastelist Maurice Quentin de La Tour, a master portraitist celebrated not only for his technical brilliance but also for his exceptional ability to capture human emotion.

Following his mentor’s footsteps, Ducreux absorbed this fascination for facial expression, an interest that would later become his trademark and push the boundaries of portraiture. In 1764, his work caused a sensation at an exhibition at the Hôtel d’Aligre, earning him a place in the Academy of Saint-Luc, a guild for artists who were unable to enter the French Royal Academy. It was while working there that Ducreux received the call that would change the course of his life.

First Painter to the Queen

It took three months for Ducreux to complete the portrait of Marie Antoinette. But it was worth the effort, upon seeing it, the King expressed his great satisfaction. But this was just the beginning. The French court commissioned several additional portraits. By June 1769, an entire gallery’s worth of Austrian nobility had been painted by Ducreux and shipped to Louis’s court. Finally, after ten months in Austria, Ducreux’s mission came to an end, and he returned to Paris.

On 7 February 1770, Louis XV formally requested the hand of Marie Antoinette in marriage to his son, the future Louis XVI. Just a few months later, on 16 May, the young couple was married in the halls of the Palace of Versailles. Ducreux’s mission had succeeded, and in recognition of his essential role in the union, Marie Antoinette honored him with a distinguished title: Painter to the King and to Her Imperial and Apostolic Majesty, the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia.

The Freedom to Meme

After his tour through the Austrian court, Ducreux returned to Paris as a painter of prestige, with a steady flow of lucrative commissions. Yet, despite his growing status, he was never granted admission to the Royal Academy. After being rejected three times, he sought an alternative path. The Salon de la Correspondance, founded by Pahin de la Blancherie, offered an exhibition space to non-academic artists to showcase their work. Unlike the rigid salons of the Royal Academy, this was a populist venture, open to innovation and free expression. Ducreux embraced the opportunity.

His first submission in 1781 was a portrait of the salon’s founder, La Blancherie. The following year, he presented a portrait of the revered Benjamin Franklin. But it was on December 10, 1783, that Ducreux revealed the artist he would become known as today: his work Self-Portrait Yawning was presented in the salon.

Freed from the constraints of wealthy patrons and the harsh judgments of the Academy, Ducreux allowed himself to experiment. He leaned into expression and playfulness, capturing not the polished ideal of a sitter, but a fleeting, candid moment—raw, vulnerable, and profoundly human. This bold departure from convention would become his signature, for better or worse, for the rest of his career.

Joseph Ducreux’s Signature Style

Joseph Ducreux dedicated almost his entire career to the portrait genre. He rarely signed his paintings. As a result, many of his works are still misattributed to other artists. Yet, his style is unmistakable: informal portraits, faces with expressive grimaces, gestures brimming with modernity, as if they had been captured with the immediacy of a contemporary camera.

This obsession with expression did not arise from nothing. Throughout history, human beings have been fascinated by facial distortions and exaggerated gestures. Ducreux aligned himself with a broader artistic tradition. As early as the 16th century, the Dutch had developed the famous tronies: head studies portraying exaggerated or unusual expressions. Around the same time as Ducreux, the Austrian sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was crafting his unsettling busts that captured extreme facial tension. Even centuries earlier, Leonardo da Vinci had explored caricature as a tool to study the limits of the human face.

After 1780, freed from the rigid conventions of classical portraiture, Ducreux began experimenting with these expressive gestures in his self-portraits. His interest in physiognomy, a pseudoscience that claimed to reveal a person’s character through the study of their facial features, strongly influenced his work.

Among his most famous paintings is La Surprise, in which Ducreux depicts himself overtaken by an exaggerated mix of surprise and terror, with wide eyes, a gaping mouth, and a dramatically outstretched right hand. Equally well-known is Le Discret (or The Silence), exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1791, where the artist raises a finger to his lips, urging the viewer to remain silent.

These portraits not only showcased Ducreux’s technical mastery but also his ability to capture the most human and theatrical aspects of the face—elevating spontaneous expression to the realm of art.

Hard Times After the French Revolution

By 1791, as the French Revolution erupted into violence, Joseph Ducreux fled to London, seeking refuge from the agitation that shaken Paris. Two years later, in 1793, the same year Marie Antoinette met her fate under the guillotine, Ducreux was granted permission to return to France. How did the former portraitist of the executed queen manage to escape the same deadly blade?

The answer lies in the intervention of one of the leading artists of the new Republic: Jacques-Louis David. A revolutionary and painter of unquestionable influence, David not only shielded Ducreux from political retribution but also helped him secure work under the new regime.

This period of Ducreux’s life is confusing and poorly documented. In January 1793, he painted a portrait of Louis XVI. Yet, later that same year, he exhibited a portrait of Maximilien Robespierre at the Paris Salon. Upon his return to Paris, Ducreux’s home transformed into an informal salon, a gathering place for artists and musicians. Among them was his friend, the composer Étienne Méhul. Their relationship was so close that Méhul later based the character of Pandolfo, the ill-tempered protagonist of his opera L’irato ou l’emporté, on Ducreux himself. Despite the humor that permeated his artwork, Ducreux was known for his notoriously bad temper and, ironically, an easy target for caricature.

It was also during this time, in 1793, that Ducreux exhibited the work that would transcend centuries and secure his place in modern culture: Self-Portrait in the Guise of a Mocker. Ducreux appears dressed in revolutionary fashion, pointing boldly at the viewer with a mischievous grin. He demands our attention, an agitator, reveling in his role as the center of it all. His gaze locks with ours, his laughter rings out, whether with us or at us is left for each viewer to decide.

The Meme Lord

Joseph Ducreux could never have imagined the strange afterlife his Self-Portrait in the Guise of a Mocker would find in the digital age. Over two centuries after its creation, the portrait resurfaced in 2009, not in a museum catalogue or an art history book, but as an Internet meme.

The image was paired with the phrase “Disregard Females, Acquire Currency”, a deliberately archaic translation of the modern rap lyric “F**k B*****s, Get Money”, attributed either to Lil Wayne’s Money on My Mind (2005) or The Notorious B.I.G.’s Get Money (1995). From that point, the meme exploded across the internet. Users began overlaying Ducreux’s portrait with faux-archaic renditions of other pop culture phrases and rap lyrics. “Who let the dogs out?” became “Gentlemen, I inquire, who hath released the hounds?,” “Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” was translated to “Do not despise the racketeer, instead, despise his sport.”

Part of the meme’s success lays in its playful complexity. It wasn’t merely about the image, it became a game. First, finding a suitable quote, then reworking it into mock-Elizabethan English, and finally, decoding it back to the original source. The meme’s flexibility made it endlessly adaptable. Over the years, it evolved into countless variations. Ducreux’s knowing smile spread across GIFs, figurines, t-shirts, baby onesies, and more.

One can’t help but wonder—would Ducreux have approved? Considering his playful approach to portraiture and his defiance of artistic conventions, it seems likely. His expressive, unorthodox self-portraits were first displayed not in the hallowed halls of the Royal Academy, but in a populist, direct-to-audience exhibition format. In a way, the meme is simply the latest, and most anarchic, iteration of his desire to engage the viewer beyond the confines of tradition.