Three South Indian girls in white sit with a hand of green bananas

Three dark-skinned young women in white sit close together on russet earth against a green wall: one holds a pink blossom over her ankle, the tallest gazes left with a gold ear-ornament catching the light, and the third bends toward the hand of green bananas lying at their feet. Signed 'Amrita Sher-Gil, South India, 1937', it comes directly out of the South Indian trilogy months — the same brooding palette and monumental calm as Brahmacharis, turned on three fruit sellers at rest.

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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