Bride's Toilet
From her South Indian trilogy, after Ajanta.
- Artist
- Amrita Sher-Gil
- Date
- 1937
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Where it is
- National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi
A young bride sits half-turned from us, bare-backed, while women around her prepare her: one combs her hair, one holds out a small bowl. A child watches from the right edge. Two red clay pots stand on the floor. The skin tones are dark and warm against a brown ground, and the bride, paler, is the one still point.
Sher-Gil painted it in 1937 after travelling through South India and visiting the Ajanta caves. It belongs with Brahmacharis and South Indian Villagers Going to Market, three pictures usually grouped as her South Indian trilogy. In them she made a conscious return to classical Indian art, and her stated aim from then on was to paint the life of Indian people.
Critics in Bombay and Lahore called her the greatest painter of the century; her paintings found few buyers. It is in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.
