Important Notice

Amrita Sher-Gil displayed a prodigious talent for art from early childhood, obsessively filling sketchbooks with drawings and watercolours. Crayon illustrations of Hungarian fairytales during her school years in Dunaharaszti, Hungary, led to paintings of female fi gures depicted "in an emotionally charged and sensuous manner," (Vivan Sundaram ed., Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters & Writings, Volume 1, New Delhi: Tulika Books,... Amrita Sher-Gil displayed a prodigious talent for art from early childhood, obsessively filling sketchbooks with drawings and watercolours. Crayon illustrations of Hungarian fairytales during her school years in Dunaharaszti, Hungary, led to paintings of female fi gures depicted "in an emotionally charged and sensuous manner," (Vivan Sundaram ed., Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters & Writings, Volume 1, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2010, p. xl) as Sher-Gil grew older and her sensibilities matured.

The Sher-Gil family moved to Simla in the 1920s, where she often painted watercolours based on her impressions of female characters from fi lms and novels, or occasionally from personal observations. Around 1924, she won her first prize for art, a cash award of Rs. 50, for painting her first responses to cinema. The present lot, with its similarity to other Sher-Gil watercolours of this time, is most likely from this period. Sher-Gil's diaries are replete with letters, observations, and her own stories and poems. One such entry which appears in Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters & Writings, describes a scene that closely resembles the one in the present lot:

"Azelda
I saw her by a clear brook dipping her feet into its transparent waters and running her white fingers through it. Her lips like pink rosebuds, her delicate features as if carved out of the whitest alabaster, her huge dark liquid eyes with her long curling eyelashes had the expression of sweet innocence, her black hair parted into two luxuriant thick braids and plaited with white seed pearls, and a little pearl pendant with three sparkling diamonds hanging from her forehead like great pure teardrops. She was clothed only in flimsy pink silk whose silky folds barely concealed her white limbs and her slender arms were bare..." (Sundaram, p. 30)

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