Elephants and riders in red circle a white shrine under a night sky

Against a near-black night sky, a procession of elephants circles a whitewashed domed shrine set among green trees. Riders in red and orange sit on the animals' backs — one perched on the nearest elephant at the centre, whose raised trunk and white tusks catch the light — while a group of walkers in crimson, orange and green robes crosses the pale courtyard, one carrying a round fan on a pole. In the foreground a mahout in an orange tunic and red turban leads a great dark elephant draped with a red-and-gold striped cloth, its tusk curving white out of the gloom. Painted at Saraya in 1940, this nocturne belongs to the final group of village pictures from Sher-Gil's last year, in which the figures shrink and the atmosphere takes over.

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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