Loaded bullock carts and white oxen against a pink wall

Along a pink wall pierced by a row of grey arched niches, timber-laden bullock carts stand in ranks: black wheels and stacked logs above, and in the foreground three carts drawn by white and chestnut oxen, their drivers in blue and red perched on the loads. Small groups of figures thread between the wheels. Signed and dated 1938 at Saraya, this long horizontal panorama — over twice as wide as it is tall — is Sher-Gil's most ambitious composition of working village life.

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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