A moustached peasant in a black hat lights his pipe on yellow

A Hungarian peasant fills the frame against a mustard-yellow ground: a tall black lambswool hat, a face burned brick-red, an extravagant rust moustache, pale grey-green shirt and dark coat. In one big pink hand he holds a lidded meerschaum pipe, caught in the moment before lighting; the dark silhouette of a stove pipe runs up the left edge. Painted at Kiskunhalas in 1938, during Sher-Gil's last Hungarian year, it treats her mother's countrymen exactly as she treated the villagers of Saraya — frontal, monumental, unsentimental.

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.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.