A tronie is a type of work common in Dutch Golden Age painting and Flemish Baroque painting that depicts an exaggerated or characteristic facial expression. These works were not intended as portraits or caricatures but as studies of expression, type, physiognomy or an interesting character such as an old man or woman, a young woman, the soldier, the shepherdess, the Oriental, or a person of a particular race.The main goal of the artists who created tronies was to achieve a lifelike representation of the figures and to show off their illusionistic abilities through the free use of color, strong light contrasts, or a peculiar color scheme. Tronies conveyed different meanings and values to their viewers. Tronies embodied abstract notions such as transience, youth, and old age, but could also function as positive or negative examples of human qualities, such as wisdom, strength, piety, folly, or impulsiveness. These works were very popular in Holland and Flanders and were produced as independent works for the free market.

In modern art-historical usage, the term tronie is typically restricted to figures not intended to depict an identifiable person, so it is a form of genre painting in a portrait format such as Leonardo da Vinci’s facial expressions or Vermeer’s Girl with Pearl Earring.