1913–1941 · Budapest, Hungary
Amrita Sher-Gil
Painter trained in Paris who came home to India at twenty-one and had seven years left to work. Her pictures of village life and of women learned from Indian miniatures and the Ajanta murals.
Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in 1913 to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, a Punjabi Sikh scholar of Sanskrit and Persian, and Marie Antoinette Gottesman, a Hungarian opera singer. The family moved to Shimla in 1921. She began formal lessons at eight, and at sixteen went to Paris with her mother, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and then the École des Beaux-Arts.
Her Paris pictures owe much to Cézanne, Gauguin and Modigliani. Young Girls (1932), modelled on her sister and a friend, won a gold medal at the Paris Salon and made her an associate in 1933, the youngest ever and the only Asian.
She came to feel her painting belonged in India and returned at the end of 1934. A tour of the south and a visit to Ajanta in 1937 turned her toward classical Indian painting and the lives of villagers. Bride’s Toilet, Brahmacharis and South Indian Villagers Going to Market came out of that journey. At Saraya, the family estate near Gorakhpur, she painted Village Scene and In the Ladies’ Enclosure, borrowing from the miniature and Pahari schools.
Critics such as Karl Khandalavala and Charles Fabri praised her. Buyers were scarce, and the Nawab Salar Jung of Hyderabad sent a batch of her paintings back.
She moved to Lahore in 1941 and died there that December, aged 28, days before a solo show was to open. The cause was never settled. Her works are declared National Art Treasures, and most of them are in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.
Notable works
- Young Girls1932
- Sleep1933
- Three Girls1935
- Bride's Toilet1937
- The Story Teller1937
