Loose black hair, a level gaze — the artist at twenty-one

Sher-Gil paints herself at twenty-one with her black hair worn loose over both shoulders, falling past the frame; a black-strapped dress, a thin gold necklace, one hand lifted to gather the hair at her side. The gaze is level and unsmiling under strong brows, the ground a scrubbed olive-green, the signature and date 1934 in the corner. Painted in the year she left Paris for India, it is among the most direct of her many self-portraits — the European training present in the modelling, the new frontal severity already hers.

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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