Match Your Selfie To A Famous Painting With Google's Art App

Ever wondered what you’d look like as an oil painting? Well, Google’s brilliant Arts & Culture app can now match your selfie to famous paintings in international museums and the results are amazing.

Over the weekend, the app’s mid-December feature release, ‘Is your portrait in a museum?’, went viral thanks to people posting their doppelgänger portraits on Facebook and Twitter.

The recent rise in use has catapulted the two-year-old art app to the number one slot on both the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.

The feature’s premise is simple: take a selfie through the app and your face will be matched via impressive computer vision technology to a number of paintings held in collections around the world.

Maybe you’ve been immortalised by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Botticelli, Whistler or Van Gogh and just never knew.

Everyone’s been trying it out with surprising outcomes.
A post shared by Kate Hudson (@katehudson) on Jan 14, 2018 at 4:55pm PST
Remembered my old deviantart profile picture was the same angle, and this is just scary.
Was I the little lady Sophie of Soho in a past life? This is legitimately weirding me out. #art #GoogleArtsandCulture pic.twitter.com/SWKyxWmJqE

— Christina deH. (@ShrtrThnThEasel) January 14, 2018
I only had to cut off an ear to get this match. Totally worth it. #googleartsandculture pic.twitter.com/o8W4SMsV64
— Bill Weir (@BillWeirCNN) January 16, 2018
From scarily spot on to downright comical, the app has made thousands of comparisons.

Some people have even used images of political figures such as Donald Trump to see what the app will return. And well, what can we say, we like what we see.

I don’t think he understands that you don’t HAVE TO share the results. #GoogleArtsandCulture pic.twitter.com/Tz9IUQYSLT
— Jimmi Simpson (@jimmisimpson) January 15, 2018
The genius feature doesn’t just stop at matching humans, you can even try to find the oil painting version of your pets.

Wow #GoogleArtsandCulture selfie match works on cats too! pic.twitter.com/GTG5IOlRuG
— Margaret Middleton (@magmidd) January 14, 2018
There’s just one catch: the feature is currently only available to certain states in America – sorry, Illinois and Texas, and the rest of the world.

But with this quick hack, you too can see if you were an oil painting in a former life that has been gazed upon by countless museum visitors. Download a VPN app that will hide your location and reload the Google app and voila, you can start discovering your arty self.

If you’d rather wait until the feature is available to your location, then you can still enjoy all the other aspects of the app, including being able to zoom in on works of art so blobs of paint feel as if you can touch them, take virtual tours of international museums, learn more about your favourite art or artist and curate personal collections.

If you liked this, then check out: Do You Have an Ancient Doppelgänger? This Museum May Have the Answer.

About the author

Freire Barnes

Art & Design Editor

Born in the heart of London, Freire's been surrounded by art since childhood. From being mesmerised by Fra Angelico's frescos in Florence to experiencing Dali's Mae West room in Caduceus, Freire's extensive travels instilled a love of the arts. After studying painting she worked for David Bowie's, Bowieart and began to write for the BBC, Bon and Dazed &amp Confused. She curated the Converse x Dazed Emerging Artists Award and was one of the first cohort to graduate from the Royal College of Art's Critical Writing in Art &amp Design MA. When not at an art opening, she's excited to bring her global art discoveries to the Culture Trip's readers.