Mahouts in red ride elephants into a pool of green water

Three dark elephants stand chest-deep in a pool of dense green water: a mahout in a red shirt turns on the nearest animal's back with an arm flung out, a second rider in pink-red sits astride the middle elephant, and a swimmer beside them raises both hands from the water. Beyond the pool's ochre bank, white bullocks graze among carts with pale wheels, a lone elephant crosses the field, and the village huts line the horizon under palms. Painted at Saraya in 1938, it is the largest of Sher-Gil's elephant subjects — village labour and animal calm held in a single green plane.

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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