Amrita Sher Gil: A Collection of 28 Paintings

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Amrita Sher-Gil (30 January 1913 – 5 December 1941) was a Hungarian-Indian painter. She has been called "one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century" and a pioneer in modern Indian art. Drawn to painting from an early age, Sher-Gil started formal lessons at the age of eight. She first gained recognition at the age of 19, for her oil painting Young Girls (1932). Sher-Gil depicted everyday life of the people in her paintings.

Sher-Gil traveled throughout her life to various countries including Turkey, France, and India, deriving heavily from precolonial Indian art styles as well as contemporary culture. Sher-Gil is considered an important painter of 20th-century India, whose legacy stands on a level with that of the pioneers from the Bengal Renaissance. She was also an avid reader and a pianist. Sher-Gil's paintings are among the most expensive by Indian women painters today, although few acknowledged her work when she was alive.

Amrita Sher-Gil was born on 30 January 1913[1] in Budapest, Hungary, to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, an Indian Punjabi Sikh aristocrat from the Majithia family and a scholar in Sanskrit and Persian, and Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer who came from an affluent bourgeois family. Her parents first met in 1912, while Marie Antoinette was visiting Lahore. Her mother came to India as a companion of Princess Bamba Sutherland, the granddaughter of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Sher-Gil was the elder of two daughters; her younger sister was Indira Sundaram (née Sher-Gil; born in March 1914), mother of the contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram. She spent most of her early childhood in Budapest. She was the niece of Indologist Ervin Baktay. Baktay noticed Sher-Gil's artistic talents during his visit to Shimla in 1926 and was an advocate of Sher-Gil pursuing art. He guided her by critiquing her work and gave her an academic foundation to grow on. When she was a young girl she would paint the servants in her house, and get them to model for her. The memories of these models would eventually lead to her return to India.

Her family faced financial problems in Hungary. In 1921, her family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla, India, and Sher-Gil soon began learning piano and violin. By age nine she, along with her younger sister Indira, was giving concerts and acting in plays at Shimla's Gaiety Theatre at Mall Road, Shimla. Though she had already been painting since the age of five, she started learning painting formally at age eight. Sher-Gil received formal lessons in art from Major Whitmarsh, who was later replaced by Beven Pateman. In Shimla, Sher-Gil lived a relatively privileged lifestyle. As a child, she was expelled from her convent school for declaring herself an atheist.

In 1923, Marie came to know an Italian sculptor, who was living in Shimla at the time. In 1924, when he returned to Italy, she too moved there, along with Amrita, and got her enrolled at Santa Annunziata, an art school in Florence. Though Amrita did not stay at this school for long and returned to India in 1924, it was here that she was exposed to works of Italian masters.

At sixteen, Sher-Gil sailed to Europe with her mother to train as a painter in Paris, first at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Pierre Vaillent and Lucien Simon (where she met Boris Taslitzky) and later at the École des Beaux-Arts (1930–1934). She drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Amedeo Modigliani, while working under the influence of her teacher Lucien Simon and through the company of artist friends and lovers like Taslitzky. While in Paris, she is said to have painted with a conviction and maturity rarely seen in a 16-year old.

In 1931, Sher-Gil was briefly engaged to Yusuf Ali Khan, but rumours spread that she was also having an affair with her first cousin and later husband Viktor Egan. Her letters reveal same-sex affairs.

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