I love self portraits. There are quite a few in my gallery. Recently I heard the term "psychological self portrait" to describe a genre of self portrait that shows not just the outer appearance of the artist but their internal emotional state. Gustave Courbet is credited with painting the first one circa 1844. Here's a link to it: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gustave_Courbet_auto-retrato.jpg Click it, it's pretty rad.
Anyhow, I am working on making a massive collection of awesome self portraits on my compy, but so far its pretty tiny. :cry: If anyones knows of awesome self portrait artists, please tell me! So far, I have a lot by R