Amrita Shergil

Amrita Sher-Gil was an Indian-Hungarian painter whose short career produced some of the defining images of twentieth-century Indian art. Born in Budapest in 1913 to a Sikh aristocrat father and a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer mother, she moved with her family to Shimla in 1921 and showed an early aptitude for drawing.

From 1929 to 1934 she studied painting in Paris, first at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Lucien Simon. Her 1932 self-portrait and the painting Young Girls, which won a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1933, established her among the youngest artists exhibiting at that level.

Returning to India in 1934, she rejected the European salon style for subjects drawn from village life across the subcontinent. Travels through Ajanta's cave paintings, the Mughal and Pahari miniature traditions, and the rural Punjab and south India produced works including Bride's Toilet, Brahmacharis, and South Indian Villagers Going to Market. Her palette flattened and her figures took on a quiet weight that marked a turn toward an Indian modernism.

She married her Hungarian first cousin Victor Egan in 1938 and moved with him to Saraya in Uttar Pradesh and later to Lahore in 1941. She fell ill on the eve of her first major Lahore solo exhibition and died in December 1941 at age 28. India later declared her work a national art treasure, restricting its export.

The name Amrita is a Sanskrit given name meaning immortal or nectar of immortality. She carried it through a body of paintings that helped define Indian modern art.