Important Notice

Considered one of India's most significant artists of the 20th century, Amrita Sher-Gil started drawing and painting as early as 1919. At the age of six, residing in the Hungarian town of Dunaharaszti, she had begun, according to her mother, "illustrating little stories I used to tell or Hungarian folk-songs of which she was very fond. Later on she would compose her own fairy stories, illustrating them with coloured crayons." (Marie Antoinette... Considered one of India's most significant artists of the 20th century, Amrita Sher-Gil started drawing and painting as early as 1919. At the age of six, residing in the Hungarian town of Dunaharaszti, she had begun, according to her mother, "illustrating little stories I used to tell or Hungarian folk-songs of which she was very fond. Later on she would compose her own fairy stories, illustrating them with coloured crayons." (Marie Antoinette quoted in Yashodhara Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life, New Delhi: Penguin, 2006, p. 14)

Sher-Gil's family relocated to Simla in the 1920s, where the artist and her sister Indira began to take lessons in English and Western classical music. Sher-Gil also began to learn art from a former teacher at London's renowned Slade School of Art, Hal Bevan Petman, who "soon realised that she was very talented, as without much effort she learnt to express form with only a single line." (Dalmia, p. 18) During these years, Sher-Gil continued to paint scenes and female characters from stories, films and occasionally personal observations that moved her, expressing these both visually and in descriptive words in her diaries. She also won her first prize for art - a cash award of Rs 50 - for painting her responses to cinema. Petman, as well as others including Italian sculptor Giulio Cesare Pasquinelli, with whom the family had developed a close acquaintance, recommended a European art education for Sher-Gil to develop her talent. For a brief period in 1924, Marie Antoinette took her daughters to Italy and enrolled Sher-Gil in a school in Florence.

The present lot was painted two years after this interlude in Italy, when the artist was back in Simla. A rebellious 13-year-old, she had rejected a formal convent education, and would "spend her days playing the piano or sketching." (Dalmia, p. 20) Her work began to exude a talent for expressing deep empathy and emotion, as seen in the present lot and lot 14. "The melancholic aspect of her work was particularly apparent in the watercolours and drawings of this period... revealed in the garb of people in dramatic situations far removed from real life." (Dalmia, p. 21)

Soon after, Marie Antoinette's brother Ervin Baktay - an artist and Indologist - visited and stayed with the family in Simla, becoming an important influence on Sher-Gil's artistic development. "The painter in Ervin was quick to recognize Amrita's artistic talent, and he guided her... Under her uncle's direction, her lines started to become strong and angular, whether in a head of Beethoven or a self-portrait. However she did not give up painting watercolours, particularly the female figure, 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, this talent for portraying emotion displayed in her early works would remain with her, manifesting in later oil paintings which often depicted women and were "handled with great sensitivity and not with superficial pity or condescension." (Dalmia, p. 20)

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