Amrita Sher-Gil: The Life of an Artist - Art History School

The Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in Hungary on the 30th January 1913. Her parents had met in London and married in 1912 in Lahore, India, which today is in Pakistan. Her father Umrao Singh Sher-Gil was a Sikh aristocrat from the Punjab, India, a Persian and Sanskrit scholar and pioneer photographer. Her mother Marie Antoinette Gottesmann was a red headed Hungarian Jewish singer.

She had a relatively privileged upbringing and at the age of eight Sher-Gil started formal art lessons with a Major Whitmarsh, but it wasn’t long before she refused to follow his very formal drawing instruction.
She first enrolled at the Grande Chaumière Academy in Paris in 1929 at the age of 16, under the watchful eye of painter Pierre Valliant who did much to improve her drawings. Later in October 1929 she attended Lucien Simon’s classes at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He encouraged her and allowed her to attend his classes despite her being underage.

Shergil enthusiastically embraced Indian culture, deciding to wear only saris and focused on painting India’s poor, particularly the everyday lives of women. She painted them at the market, at weddings, and undertaking menial domestic chores. The paintings were infused with melancholy and loneliness, but there is a raw honesty about them. At a time when most artists portrayed women as content and compliant, Sher-Gil’s treatment of female subjects was singularly unique, revealing their dignity and silent resolve. Her paintings are not a romanticised view of the poor. Her most famous paintings are Two Women and Self Portrait as a Tahitian.
Amrita Sher-Gil’s legacy is unparalleled, in both her life and art, she was a woman both within and ahead of her time and became one of India's most compelling artists of the 20th century.

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