Portrait of Cristina, My Sister

Portrait of Cristina, My Sister is a 1928 oil-on-panel painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, measuring 79.8 by 60.3 cm, now in a private collection; it is signed and dated 'FRIEDA KAHLO, 1928' in the German spelling she still used.

Cristina, born in June 1908, was the youngest of the four Kahlo sisters — only eleven months younger than Frida — and would become her closest confidante. In the portrait she sits three-quarter length in a sleeveless white dress, her sleek bob and red lips presenting the polished modern femininity that Frida's biographer Hayden Herrera described as 'lively, generous, and beguilingly feminine'. A small tree stands at a distance while a larger leafy branch presses into the foreground at the right.

The picture belongs to a group of portraits of family and friends — among them Alicia Galant and Dorothy Fox Brown — that Kahlo made in the late 1920s as she recovered from the 1925 bus accident that nearly killed her. She recalled carrying her paintings to Diego Rivera, then painting the Ministry of Education frescoes, to ask his opinion; this portrait, painted the year they met, may have been among them.

Kahlo gave the painting to Cristina herself; it descended to Cristina's daughter Isolda Pinedo Kahlo and entered the auction record at Christie's in 1985, then sold at Sotheby's in New York in 1988 and again in 2001, before returning to Christie's New York on 9 November 2023. Cristina later figured painfully in Frida's life: it was the discovery of Diego Rivera's affair with her in the mid-1930s that prompted Kahlo's painting A Few Small Nips.