Women gather beneath vermilion columns on a Simla verandah

On a verandah flanked by columns painted a burning vermilion, a group of women gathers on the ground: one in deep red presses her cheek to her folded hands, her long braid falling over her shoulder; beside her a companion in a yellow veil and plum-red dress sits with her knees drawn up; behind them a man in an orange shirt and two veiled women — one wrapped in white, one in green — bend toward each other in conversation. At the lower right, a green-and-red patterned quilt lies folded on a woven charpai beside a red pot, and at the top of the passage two small figures in pink and black walk away between the columns. Painted at Simla in 1938, in the unusually tall, narrow format Sher-Gil borrowed from the Pahari tradition, it turns an ordinary hill-station verandah into a frieze of colour.

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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