Automatic facial expression recognition (FER) is becoming increasingly important in the area of affective computing systems because of its various emerging applications such as human-machine interface and human emotion analysis. Recently, sparse representation based FER has become popular and has shown an impressive performance. However, sparse representation could often produce less meaningful sparse solution for FER due to intra-class variation such as variation in identity or illumination. This paper proposes a new sparse representation based FER method, aiming to reduce the intra-class variation while emphasizing the facial expression in a query face image. To that end, we present a new method for generating an intra-class variation image of each expression by using training expression images. The appearance of each intra-class variation image could be close to the appearance of the query face image in identity and illumination. Therefore, the differences between the query face image and its intra-class variation images are used as the expression features for sparse representation. Experimental results show that the proposed FER method has high discriminating capability in terms of improving FER performance. Further, the intra-class variation images of non-neutral expressions are complementary with that of neutral expression, for improving FER performance.