“They say—and I am willing to believe it—that it is difficult to know yourself—but it isn’t easy to paint yourself, either.” - Vincent van Gogh

In terms of selfies, Van Gogh was not far behind Rembrandt, having painted 35 self-portraits in just one short decade of activity. That is roughly 4.2% of his total output and more than three self-portraits a year!

Van Gogh believed that painting could be reinvented through portraiture and fantasized about building a colony of artists working together. He also knew that Japanese wood block printers often exchanged prints among each other and encouraged his besties Gauguin and Bernard to exchange self-portraits with him.

As Van Gogh wrote:

It clearly proves that they [Japanese wood block printers] liked one another and stuck together, and that there was a certain harmony among them [. . .] The more we resemble them in that respect, the better it will be for us.

Van Gogh had essentially come up with an old-school social network where people could share and comment on each other’s selfies, not unlike Instagram or Snapchat. He wrote to his brother Theo sharing his thoughts on the self-portraits he received from Gauguin and Emile Bernard. Here is what Van Gogh’s comments would have looked like in Instagram (using actual quotes from correspondence between the artists).