Family Portrait by Frida Kahlo depicts the whole Kahlo fam, plus a few unidentified others.

Frida and her family were a tight-knit bunch. They all lived in the same house, ate the same meals, and in the case of Frida’s sister Christina, had sex with the same men. Christina slept with Diego Rivera while he was with Frida, which temporarily put a rift between the Kahlo sisters, but aside from that, this family was tight.

Frida started this painting in the 1940s while she was in the hospital and continued working on it until the death of her sister, Matilde. Either the death of her sister was too much to bear or Frida became distracted by the painting that she made next, Portrait of My Father, but Frida never returned to this work, leaving the interpretation of who the faceless people on the bottom right are up to critics. Up on the top are all four of Frida’s grandparents. Below them are Frida’s parents, her mother a Mexican mestiza (a woman of Spanish and indigenous American ancestry) and her father, a German immigrant.

Then on the last tier is Frida in the center, her sisters Matilde and Adriana to the left, and her sister Christina to the right. Critics have speculated that the faceless people to the right of Christina are either her children, Isolda and Antonio, or Frida’s half-sisters from her father’s first marriage, Maria Luisa and Margarita. Either way it was nice of her to almost include them in the family tree. Lastly, there is the tiny fetus in the bottom center of the painting. This is either Frida’s brother, who only lived a few days after his birth, or a representation of the miscarriages and abortions that Frida had throughout her life. No wonder she never finished this piece, it’s an existential crisis waiting to happen.