Itzcuintli Dog with Me

Itzcuintli Dog with Me (Perro itzcuintli conmigo) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Frida Kahlo, dated to about 1938 and now in a private collection recorded in Dallas, Texas. Seated in a dark dress with a white underskirt and a cigarette in her hand, Kahlo looks out at the viewer while a small dark hairless dog stands at her feet.

The dog is an itzcuintli — better known today as the xoloitzcuintli — the Mexican hairless breed kept in Mexico since pre-Hispanic times. Kahlo's Casa Azul was full of animals: monkeys, parrots, a deer and several of these dogs, companions she reportedly kept in place of the children she could not have. An X-ray made during a restoration showed that she had reused the canvas: beneath the present portrait lies an earlier composition of small birds and plants around a lake. Like Fulang-Chang and I (1937) and Me and My Parrots (1941), it belongs to the series of self-portraits in which she paired her own image with a pet.

At 71.1 by 52.1 centimetres the portrait was among the loans to the touring retrospective Frida Kahlo organised by the Walker Art Center, shown in Minneapolis, Philadelphia and San Francisco between 2007 and 2008. It has also been catalogued in exhibition records under the Spanish variant title Escuincle y yo. The mood of the picture — the fashionable dress, the cigarette, the strange naked pet kept at a distance rather than cuddled — has been taken to show the mix of elegance and detachment in her late-1930s self-presentation.