Sher-Gil's last canvas

In September 1941 Amrita Sher-Gil and her husband, the Hungarian doctor Viktor Egan, moved to Lahore. She lived and painted at 23 Ganga Ram Mansions, on The Mall, with her studio on the top floor. She was twenty-eight. The critics Karl Khandalavala in Bombay and Charles Fabri in Lahore had already called her the greatest painter of the century. She was preparing her first major solo show in the city.

From the terrace she could see the milkmen’s buffaloes that lived near the house. She started to paint them.

The view from the roof

The canvas was first called On the Roof. It is oil, 65.7 by 87.5 centimetres.

What it shows is not quite settled. Accounts of her plan speak of the buffaloes. The National Gallery of Modern Art’s own text, on Google Arts & Culture, sees four cows resting in an alley. Either way, the animals’ bodies run into one another. The buildings are blocks of paint with soft edges. There are people too, at least two figures in orange cloaks and white skirts, so close in tone to the brown ground that at first the picture seems empty of anyone.

The colours are flat panels of red, yellow and brown. The gallery’s text compares the method to Cézanne’s late quarry paintings and the palette to Gauguin, and links those earth colours to the Indian landscape she had been painting since she came back from Europe.

How she got there

Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in 1913, to a Sikh aristocrat and scholar, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, and a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer, Marie Antoinette Gottesman. She trained in Paris. Her early work is European in manner: self-portraits, nudes, portraits of friends.

Then she came to India, and the work changed. Living at her father’s family estate at Saraya, near Gorakhpur, she painted village life: Village Scene, In the Ladies’ Enclosure, Siesta. She looked hard at Mughal and Pahari miniatures and at the cave paintings of Ajanta. She put it plainly, in a line now used as an exhibition title: “Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque… India belongs to me.”

Critics admired her. Buyers were fewer. Wikipedia records that the Nawab Salar Jung of Hyderabad sent her paintings back, and that the Maharaja of Mysore chose works by Raja Ravi Varma over hers.

December

A few days before the Lahore show was to open, she fell seriously ill and slipped into a coma. She died around midnight on 5 December 1941. The cause has never been established. A failed abortion followed by peritonitis has been suggested. Her mother accused Egan of killing her. The next day Britain declared war on Hungary, and Egan, a Hungarian citizen in British India, was interned as an enemy alien. She was cremated in Lahore on 7 December.

The painting on the roof was left as it was.

After

There is a later layer to the canvas. The edition of her letters and writings by her nephew, the artist Vivan Sundaram, gives a detailed account of the painting. It records a black shape in the bottom right corner that was removed in a restoration some time after 1944. So the unfinished painting we see is not quite the one she left. Someone else has edited it, a little.

The painting is now at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, which holds most of her work. In the 1970s the government declared Sher-Gil’s works national art treasures under the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act. Notifications in 1976 and 1979 named nine artists in all. It means her paintings may be owned and kept in India, but not taken out of it.

Why the last one matters

Most of her finished pictures are of people: women at rest, women waiting, women in groups looking at nothing in particular. The last canvas is mostly animals and walls, and the people in it are hard to find. It is darker than what came before, and looser.

Nobody can say where it was going. Its title is also its whole biography.