BEDFORD-STUYVESANT — You don’t need to travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to get a glimpse of Vincent van Gogh — just hop on the G train.
The post-Impressionist's 21st-century doppelgänger was spotted on the subway last week — and a picture posted on Reddit has turned the artist's double into a celebrity.
“So I ran into Vincent van Gogh today…” the post reads, accompanied by a side-by-side picture of the mysterious lookalike and the artist’s famous self-portrait.
Brooklyn resident Robert Reynolds jumped on the Reddit thread shortly after to reveal his identity.
“About two to three times a week, people stop me to tell me I look like Vincent van Gogh,” Reynolds, 36, an actor, told DNAinfo New York.
“Or they’ll try to take photos, usually on the train.”
The North Carolina native first gained comparisons to van Gogh in 2010 when he moved to New York and grew out his beard.
“The first person to say something was my husband’s professor and, from that moment on, it happened so regularly that it just became a part of who I am," he said.
"Recently I was thinking maybe I'll do just a mustache for the summer, but now I feel like I've got to hold on to this," he said, referencing his look.
The actor even dressed as van Gogh for Halloween one year, donning a straw cowboy hat, a bandage over his ear and a tweed jacket to mimic the painter’s “Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat.”
“It was the cheapest costume I’ve ever put together but it was the most successful. It was ridiculous,” he said.
Reynolds’ likeness to the painter hasn’t landed him any van Gogh roles just yet, but it did score him a couple of free drinks after a bartender recognized him as the artist’s modern-day double.
When he’s not furrowing his brow on the G train, the Bed-Stuy resident acts with theater company Amios and works as a dog walker in Manhattan.
Occasionally he’ll stop by the Met to stand in front of the painter's self-portraits, drawing crowds with a brooding expression, he said.
You can also find the van Gogh lookalike strumming out tunes on his guitar at the Metropolitan Avenue G train station, where he sings a mix of Leonard Cohen and “acoustic folksy versions of Mariah Carey songs.”
Reynolds said he’s excited about his newfound claim to fame as van Gogh’s doppelgänger and hopes to participate in artistic projects playing the historical figure.
His Twitter feed already gives a nod to the artist. Recent tweets start with “Dear Theo,” in reference to van Gogh’s letters to his younger brother.
“I think if van Gogh was around today, he would be in New York, maybe Brooklyn,” Reynolds said.
“I feel like he would get a lot of inspiration from the people and neighborhoods here, and I feel like ‘Starry Night’ would be a long wall with his impressionist version of graffiti."
