Self-Portrait With Charlie (1995) by David Hockney. Photograph: David Hockney
The top 10 self-portraits in art
From an anxious Lucian Freud to an enigmatic Rembrandt and a noirish Cindy Sherman, these self-portraits take the selfie to a new artistic level
Jonathan Jones Thursday 4 September 2014 14.23 BST
David Hockney – Self-Portrait With Charlie (1995)
Hockney is ruthless in his self-portraits; he never poses or tries to look good. What he does is to record the act of self-portraiture – the fact of a painter looking in a mirror and trying to record what he sees – and give it a deliberately awkward material truth. In doing so, he paints the ideal of honest observation.
Parmigianino – Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c 1524)
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c 1524) by Parmigianino. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images
It's not only modern artists who portray themselves in thought-provoking ways. In the early 16th-century, Parmigianino looked at himself in a convex mirror and painted his distorted reflection, his huge hand close to the surface of the picture, his face the focus of a selfie-like bubble image, in which time and space warp vertiginously. This precocious painting is the theme of John Ashbery's great poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
Pablo Picasso – Self-Portrait Facing Death (1972)
Picasso always portrayed himself with big eyes that seem to swallow up the beholder, insisting, even as he turns himself into a painted object, that it is he, not you, who does the looking. Those eyes were never bigger – or braver – than in this unillusioned, atheist painting of the artist battered by time and recognising the nearness of his own mortality.
