My Nurse and I

My Nurse and I (Mi nana y yo) is an oil-on-sheet-metal painting by Frida Kahlo, made in 1937 and held by the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City. In it Kahlo appears as a small child with an unmistakably adult face — her own — suckled by a brown-skinned wet nurse whose head is a pre-Hispanic stone mask, while drops of milk fall like rain through the cloudy sky.

Kahlo herself explained the picture decades later. In a recollection recorded by the writer Raquel Tibol in May 1953 she said her mother could not breastfeed her because her sister Cristina was born when Frida was eleven months old, so a wet nurse fed her; she described painting herself with a grown woman's face on a little girl's body, with milk falling from the nurse's breast as if from the sky. Diego Rivera read the mask in 1943 as a way of picturing a woman whose face Kahlo no longer remembered; scholars have linked it more broadly to Indigenous Mexico and the idea of the earth itself as a mother.

The painting, 30.5 by 36.8 centimetres, travelled early: it was listed as Moi et ma nourrice in André Breton's 1939 Mexique exhibition in Paris, and archive records show attempts that year and in 1941 to sell it to the collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg. It eventually entered the Museo Dolores Olmedo among works acquired from the family of the collector Eduardo Morillo Safa.