This portrait depicts Rivera's second wife, the artist Frida Kahlo (1907-54), sitting on a bed wearing stockings and shoes and fastening rows of beads around her neck. An accident whilst travelling on a trolleybus during her adolescence had left Kahlo disabled; she was also unable to bear children. The couple both conducted extra-marital affairs, and divorced in 1939, only to remarry the following year. Kahlo died at the age of forty-seven. The circumstances of her death remain unknown but there is some suggestion that she committed suicide. Primarily a painter, Kahlo made only one print, a self-portrait in which she expressed her pain after a miscarriage in 1932. Rivera made this print in Mexico City a year after he married Kahlo, and it is one of the first prints he made when approached by Carl Zigrosser of the Weyhe Gallery. It shows the influence of Rivera's time in Europe, the soft curves of the sitter's body and the use of large, smooth surfaces resembling the style of Henri Matisse, particularly his Fauve works.
