Historical paintings are really into taking selfies. We just thought you should know.

Selfies are finally a thing of the past! Well, they’re still happening in the present and foreseeable future (don’t worry), but they’re also happening in the past. Historical paintings have started snapping selfies in museums all over the world, and it’s pretty fantastic. Denmark-based art director, Olivia Muus, started the photographic phenomenon with her portrait series titled #museumofselfie (more like #Muus-eumofselfie, am I right?), where Muus visits museums and takes pictures of 17th and 18th century paintings snapping selfies. Or at least, that’s how it looks.

In each image, Muus uses someone’s hand to hold a smartphone (usually an iPhone) in front of a painting, and places the hand in such a position that it creates the illusion that the subject of the painting is taking an actual selfie. It doesn’t look super-real, but it definitely looks real enough for a good chuckle. On her Tumblr page, Muus explains how she came up with the idea.

“This is a project that started when my friend (AKA right hand) and I went to the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen,” she says, “I took a picture for fun and liked how this simple thing could change their character and give their facial expression a whole new meaning.”

Between you and me, I’m pretty anti-selfie (at least for myself-ie), but these are some selfies that I can definitely get behind. Here are a few of her images:

Selfie-lovers (and funny people in general) have joined in on the project and have taken some of their own selfie-graphs of the historical portrait subjects (subjects who, mind you, lived at least one or two centuries before the invention of the telephone and at least four before the invention of the selfie):

(Featured images via Tumblr.)