Diego Rivera is one of the pre-eminent Mexican painters of the twentieth century, his style synonymous with the heroic and monumental murals that illustrated national identity within the sphere of leftist politics. Among his peers José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rivera argued for a legible and allegorical approach to painting, making it both widely accessible for the masses and independent of contemporary European avant-garde practice. Endeavoring to find an artistic language rooted in Mexico, and not within Europe, Rivera turned his eye to the people of his country and its traditions. In both subject matter and style, Portrait of a Mexican Woman (1947) is emblematic of the artist’s ceaseless search for a distinctly Mexican approach to painting.