Amrita Sher-Gil

Born in Budapest to a Punjabi Sikh father and a Hungarian-Jewish mother, she grew up in Shimla, where private tutors taught her piano, violin, and painting. She trained briefly in Florence before spending five years at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, absorbing the colour theories of Cézanne and the pictorial boldness of Gauguin. But Paris was always a detour. In 1934^[2] she returned to India and reoriented her practice entirely.

The paintings she made after that return are the ones for which she is remembered. "I realized my real artistic mission," she wrote, "to interpret the life of Indians and particularly the poor Indians pictorially." Group of Three Girls (1935^[2]), the first canvas she completed back in India, shows three young women on the threshold of adulthood and marriage, their resignation rendered through a flatter, more linear style that absorbs classical Indian compositional principles without abandoning the Parisian discipline. The painting won a Gold Medal at the Bombay Art Society three years later.

She was characteristically direct about her position: "I can only paint in India. Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque. India belongs only to me." The claim proved tragically brief. She died in Lahore in December 1941^[2], aged twenty-eight, before she could fulfil it, but her influence extended well beyond her own lifetime, inspiring Pakistani modernists including Zubeida Agha a generation after Partition.