Look me in the eye

James Hall

• The Artist's Body edited by Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones
  Phaidon, 304 pp, £39.95, July 2000, ISBN 0 7148 3502 1
• Five Hundred Self-Portraits edited by Julian Bell
  Phaidon, 528 pp, £19.95, November 2000, ISBN 0 7148 3959 0
• Renaissance Self-Portraiture by Joanna Woods-Marsden
  Yale, 285 pp, £45.00, October 1998, ISBN 0 300 07596 0

According to the catalogue for the National Gallery exhibition of Rembrandt self-portraits, the artist’s portrayal of himself is ‘unique in art history, not only in its scale and the length of time it spans, but also in its regularity’. But Rembrandt’s production of self-portraits – at least forty paintings, 31 etchings and a few drawings – is unique only if we ignore the last fifty years. Nowadays, it is not unusual to find artists whose oeuvre consists of little else. Indeed, the mounting of the first big exhibition devoted to Rembrandt’s self-portraits is symptomatic of our fascination with the genre. Rembrandt by Himself opened within a few days of the announcement that Tracey Emin – whose etchings, collages, installations and performances constitute a lurid confessional – had been shortlisted for the Turner Prize.