Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser

In 1940 the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo painted Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr Eloesser, an oil-on-masonite self-portrait measuring 59.5 by 40 cm, held since late 2020 by the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles.

Leo Eloesser was a noted thoracic surgeon based in San Francisco who became Kahlo's longtime medical advisor and friend; she affectionately called him her 'querido doctorcito' and had painted his portrait in 1931. In 1940, recently divorced from Diego Rivera and having consulted Eloesser about a painful hand, she painted her own portrait for him and inscribed it on a parchment scroll: 'I painted my portrait in the year 1940 for Dr Leo Eloesser, my doctor and my best friend. With all love, Frida Kahlo.'

Kahlo shows herself in a three-quarter view against budding branches and dry twigs beneath a pink-grey sky, flowers massed in her braided hair. On her exposed ear hangs a white earring in the shape of a small downward-pointing hand, identified by the Museo Frida Kahlo as a gift from Pablo Picasso. Around her neck a single strand of thorns cuts into the skin and draws beads of blood, recalling the thorn necklace of her better-known hummingbird self-portrait of the same year.

The painting spent decades in private hands — it was credited to a private collector in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's 2020–2021 Kahlo exhibition — before the Lucas Museum acquired it in late 2020 for its inaugural collection; the museum's director at the time told the Los Angeles Times she considered it 'the Mona Lisa of Mexico.'