A charpai sleeper in orange, a spinning wheel, a green hill

In the drowsy heat of a Simla afternoon, a woman in a marigold bodice and flame-orange skirt sleeps on a low charpai, her head on a pink bolster; beside her a child in white dozes against the bed's edge and a woman in a dark shawl sits at a crimson spinning wheel, thread stretched to the spindle. A veiled figure in red-and-white crouches at the left, two women stand wrapped in maroon under the green swell of a hill, and at the right two more in scarlet climb white steps past a whitewashed shrine. Painted in 1937, Siesta compresses a whole village afternoon — sleep, work and errand — into one dark, glowing frieze.

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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