A white-domed shrine, a red shawl and a tale told on the ground

In a courtyard below a whitewashed domed shrine, a white-bearded elder in a green shirt and turban raises a hand as he speaks to the small circle gathered on the dark earth — a woman wrapped entirely in a vermilion shawl, her face in shadow, two children in pale blue and a figure seen from behind. A stone mortar and pestle, a red clay pot and a black bowl with a few pink petals scattered beside it anchor the foreground; two tiny figures in red and green walk through the shrine's doorway behind bare saplings, and dark trees with flashes of red trunks close the sky. Painted at Saraya in 1940 (signed and dated lower left), this is the rural Uttar Pradesh of Sher-Gil's last year, pared down to colour, silhouette and silence.

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) was born in Budapest to a Sikh aristocrat and a Hungarian opera singer, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and returned to India in 1934 determined to paint the country's people rather than its picturesque surface. In the seven years left to her she fused the flat colour and frontal stillness of Ajanta murals and Pahari miniatures with the Post-Impressionist lessons of Gauguin and Cézanne, producing the foundation of modern Indian painting. She died in Lahore at twenty-eight; her work is declared a National Art Treasure by the Government of India and is held chiefly by the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

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