Frida Kahlo and the Blue House

In 1925, Frida Kahlo was an eighteen-year-old student with a clear plan: she was going to be a doctor. She had been born in Coyoacán in 1907, when it was still a quiet town on the edge of Mexico City, and had grown up in her family's house there. Today it is known as the Blue House. As a child she had survived polio, which left her right leg thinner than her left, but it had not slowed her down. She was one of only a few dozen girls at the National Preparatory School, and she was studying with the aim of entering medicine.

On September 17, 1925, everything changed. Frida was travelling home from school with her boyfriend when the bus they were riding in collided with a streetcar. Several passengers were killed. Frida survived, but an iron handrail had pierced her pelvis, and her spine and her right leg had been broken in several places. Having spent weeks in hospital, she was sent home to the Blue House, where she was confined to bed, often in a plaster corset, for months.

Medical school was now out of the question, and lying in bed day after day, with nothing to do but think, was its own kind of pain. Her mother had a special easel made so that Frida could paint lying down, and a mirror was fixed to the underside of the canopy above her bed. Her father, a photographer who also painted in his spare time, lent her his box of oil paints. With only her own reflection to look at, Frida began painting the one subject that was always there: herself.

She never stopped. Over the next three decades, she produced dozens of self-portraits, and she became one of the most recognised artists of the twentieth century. In 1929 she married the muralist Diego Rivera, and although they lived in other places over the years, the Blue House remained her home. Her health, however, never fully recovered from the accident, and she underwent many operations.

In April 1953, her first solo exhibition in Mexico opened in a gallery in Mexico City. Her doctors had told her not to go, so she arrived by ambulance, and her bed was carried into the gallery so that she could greet her guests from it. She died in the Blue House the following year, on July 13, 1954. Since 1958, the house has been the Frida Kahlo Museum, and it is visited by people from all over the world.

Upstairs in the museum, visitors can still see a canopy bed with a mirror facing down above the pillow. It was in a bed like that one, staring up at her own face, that a young woman who had planned to spend her life studying the human body learned to paint her own.