A girl in pale blue looks away; a woman in rose sits behind

A dark-haired girl in a pale blue blouse fills the right of the canvas, her head turned in three-quarter profile, lips full and red, eyes fixed on something beyond the frame. Behind her, sketched thinner, a woman wrapped in rose-pink sits against the grey-green wall, and the bare branches of a tree cross the upper corner. Signed and dated 1934, painted at Simla shortly after Sher-Gil's return to India — the model was her young cousin — it hovers deliberately between finish and sketch, the girl solid, the world behind her provisional.

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.