Amrita Sher-Gil

A family between Hungary and India

Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in 1913 to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, an Indian scholar and photographer, and Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Hungarian opera singer. Her childhood moved between Europe and India, with drawing encouraged before formal study began.

Paris, 1929–1934

Sher-Gil arrived in Paris with her family in 1929. She entered the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Pierre Vaillant, then joined Lucien Simon's studio at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. She learned French, painted from the model, and exhibited with other students.

Four years of training gave her technical command of oil paint and direct access to European modernism. The National Gallery of Modern Art identifies the Post-Impressionists, including Paul Gauguin, as important to this period. In 1933 Young Girls earned her election as an associate of the Grand Salon.

Returning to India

Sher-Gil returned to India in 1934 because she believed her principal work belonged there. She traveled through the country and replaced the Paris studio subjects with village groups, women, laborers, and landscapes painted in a denser, earthier palette.

She died in Lahore in 1941 at twenty-eight. The career was short, but the combination of Paris training and sustained attention to Indian subjects made her a central figure in the history of modern Indian painting.