Amrita Sher-Gilਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤਾ ਸ਼ੇਰ-ਗਿੱਲ

Amrita Sher-Gil was born on 30 January 1913 in Budapest, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, was a Punjabi Sikh aristocrat of the Majithia family of Majitha in Amritsar district, and a scholar of Sanskrit and Persian; her mother, Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, was a Hungarian opera singer from a prosperous family. The two had met in Lahore, where Marie Antoinette had travelled as a companion to Princess Bamba, a granddaughter of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Amrita was the elder of two daughters, and the family, held in Hungary by the First World War, moved in 1921 to Summer Hill in Shimla. She had been drawing since she was five, and in Shimla she began formal lessons, as well as the piano and violin.

Paris training and the breakthrough of Young Girls

In 1929 the family returned to Europe so the sisters could train in Paris. Amrita studied first at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and then at the École des Beaux-Arts, from 1930 to 1934, under Lucien Simon, absorbing the influence of Cézanne, Gauguin and Modigliani. Her breakthrough came at nineteen: the oil painting Young Girls, completed in 1932, won a gold medal and her election in 1933 as an Associate of the Grand Salon, the youngest member ever admitted and the only Asian to receive the honour. The self-portraits of these years, sombre, pensive and bold by turns, already show a painter fully in command of her gift.

Return to India and finding her subject

Yet Paris left her restless. One of her teachers had remarked that her rich colouring belonged to the East, and by 1933 she was, in her own words, haunted by a longing to return to India, where she felt her destiny as a painter lay. She came back at the end of 1934 and set out to rediscover Indian art from within: the Mughal and Pahari miniature traditions, and above all the great cave paintings of Ajanta. The result was a new manner, simplified forms, deep glowing colour, and Indian people painted with a gravity European art had rarely allowed them. Group of Three Girls, painted in 1935, announced the transformation.

The South Indian trilogy and the Saraya years

In 1937 Sher-Gil toured the south of India and produced the three paintings known as her South Indian trilogy: Brahmacharis, Bride's Toilet and South Indian Villagers Going to Market. In 1938 she married her Hungarian cousin Viktor Egan, and the couple settled at Saraya in Gorakhpur district, at her family's estate, where she painted Village Scene, In the Ladies' Enclosure and Siesta, drawing on miniature painting for their quiet rhythms. She was a Congress sympathiser, drawn to Gandhi's philosophy, and her declared mission was to express the life of Indian people through her canvas. 'I can only paint in India,' she wrote. 'Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque. India belongs only to me.' Critics such as Karl Khandalavala praised her as the finest painter of the century, even though buyers were few in her lifetime.

Why did Amrita Sher-Gil die so young?

In September 1941 Sher-Gil and Egan moved to Lahore, then one of the great cultural cities of undivided India, where she worked in a studio at Ganga Ram Mansions on the Mall. Days before the opening of her first major solo exhibition there, she fell seriously ill and slipped into a coma. She died on 5 December 1941, aged twenty eight. The cause of her death was never established with certainty, and the uncertainty has fed speculation ever since; what is certain is the scale of what was lost. She was cremated in Lahore on 7 December 1941, leaving her last painting unfinished.

Legacy: a national treasure

The Government of India has declared Sher-Gil's paintings National Art Treasures, which means they cannot be taken out of the country; most are held by the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, and some hang in the Lahore Museum. India Post issued a stamp in her honour in 1978, and a major Delhi road bears her name. Her paintings, which found few buyers while she lived, now set records for Indian art at auction. For Punjab, she is a daughter of two worlds: born in Budapest, formed in Paris, and rooted, by her own fierce choice, in the soil of her father's Majitha. Painter, pianist and letter writer of brilliance, she did in twenty eight years what most artists are not given twice the time to do.