Important Notice

Amrita Sher-Gil exhibited a precocious talent for drawing years before she would be distinguished as one of the most significant artists of 20th-century India. Her mother Marie Antoinette recalled her making illustrations based on Hungarian folk songs and stories at their home in the town of Dunaharaszti, on the outskirts of Budapest, as early as 1919 when she was just six years old. The Sher-Gil family relocated to Shimla in 1921 where Sher-Gil... Amrita Sher-Gil exhibited a precocious talent for drawing years before she would be distinguished as one of the most significant artists of 20th-century India. Her mother Marie Antoinette recalled her making illustrations based on Hungarian folk songs and stories at their home in the town of Dunaharaszti, on the outskirts of Budapest, as early as 1919 when she was just six years old. The Sher-Gil family relocated to Shimla in 1921 where Sher-Gil and her sister Indira began receiving lessons in English and French and were also tutored in the arts, as was common of aristocratic families of the time. Both learnt to play the piano and violin and to dance, but Sher-Gil developed a particular passion for painting and filled her sketchbooks with watercolours, like lot 32. She earned her first art prize-a Rs 50 cash award-for painting responses to cinema at age 10.

After meeting Italian sculptor Giulio Pasquinelli, who became a close friend, Marie Antoinette decided to enrol her daughters in a school in Florence, which she considered to be the centre of artistic achievement at the time. Sher-Gil rebelled against the idea and returned to Shimla in June 1924, after only six months. She rejected the idea of formal education and “spent her days playing piano and sketching.” (Dalmia, p. 20) Now 13, she began to draw with increasing empathy and emotion, sketching female nudes and “expressive scenes” inspired by American romantic and German expressionist films; the literature of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; the music of Chopin, Beethoven and Debussy; and occasionally her own personal observations. (Vivan Sundaram, “Prologue,” Vivan Sundaram ed., Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writings - Volume I, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2010, pp. xxxix - xI)

Sher-Gil began receiving formal training in art from Major Whitmarsh and Hal Bevan-Petman, the latter a graduate of London’s Slade School of Art and an accomplished portraitist. Recognising her natural talent, Petman noted how effortlessly she captured form with a single line. (Yashodhara Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life, New Delhi: Penguin, 2006, p. 18). Her artistic growth was further influenced by her uncle Ervin Baktay, an artist and Indologist, who recognized her talent early on when he came to visit the family in India in the summer of 1926.

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