This was a good exercise that taught me a lot about self-portraits. I had seen them before, obviously, but I hadn’t realised how widespread they were, nor had I ever considered why an artist would paint a self-portrait.
Two really useful books I read were Self Portraits by Liz Rideal and A Face to the World by Laura Cumming.
I was really grateful to have discovered the work of Felix Nussbaum in this exercise. I had not heard of him before now but I found his self-portrait incredibly haunting.
The exercise can be found here: Research Self Portraits No Pics