Girl with Death Mask

Girl with Death Mask (Niña con máscara de muerte), also shown under the title She Plays Alone, is a 1938 oil-on-metal painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo; at just 14.9 by 11 cm it is one of her smallest works, held by the Nagoya City Art Museum in Japan.

A little girl — identified by some writers with the young Frida herself — stands alone in a bare landscape under a cloudy sky, wearing a pink dress and a grinning skull mask of the kind sold as a toy for the Day of the Dead. In her hands she holds a marigold, the cempasúchil flower placed on Mexican graves to guide the dead, and at her feet lies a second mask, a snarling tiger face, of the sort used as a charm to protect children from evil.

The Nagoya City Art Museum reads the picture both as mourning for a child Kahlo lost through miscarriage and as a meditation on a death no one escapes; Dolores del Río, an early owner of the painting, is reported to have said that Kahlo painted it to express her grief for a lost child. The alternate title She Plays Alone underlines the solitude of the figure.

Kahlo gave the painting to her friend, the actress Dolores del Río. It later passed through a private collection in Monterey, California, before the Nagoya City Art Museum acquired it in 1996.