Red buildings, black buffaloes and a yellow lane, left mid-breath

A village lane in Lahore climbs through blocks of colour: coral-red walls and rooftops where two figures in red and green bend over a ledge of round loaves, a grey house with a single dark window, crimson and yellow buildings behind trees, and below, on the yellow road, two black buffaloes — one standing under a blue cloth, one lying down — with a crow perched on the standing animal's back. Left on the easel unfinished at Sher-Gil's death in December 1941 at twenty-eight, the bare passages at the edges show her hand mid-thought; it was never signed.

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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