Amrita Shergill

Amrita Sher-Gil  was an eminent Indian painter, sometimes known as India's Freda Kahlo, and today considered an important woman painter of 20th century India, whose legacy stands at par with that of the Masters of Bengal Renaissance she is also the 'most expensive' woman painter of India.

   Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest, Hungary to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, a Sikh aristocrat and also a scholar in Sanskrit and Persian, and Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Jewish Opera singer from Hungary. Her mother came to India as a companion of Princess Bamba Sutherland .Sher-Gil was the elder of two daughters born. Her younger sister was Indira Sundaram , mother of the contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram. She spent most of early childhood in Budapest. She was the niece of Indologist Ervin Baktay. He guided her by critiquing her work and gave her an academic foundation to grow on. He also instructed her to use servants as models. The memories of these models would eventually lead to her return to India

    At sixteen, Sher-Gil sailed to Europe with her mother to train as a painter at Paris, first at the Grande Chaumiere under Pierre Vaillant and later at École des Beaux-Arts (1930–34) she drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin while coming under the influence of her teacher Lucien Simon and the company of artist friends and lovers like Boris Tazlitsky. Her early paintings display a significant influence of the Western modes of painting, especially as being practised in the Bohemian circles of Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, she made her first important work, Young Girls , which led to her election as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933, making her the youngest ever and the only Asian to have received this recognition hence.

    In 1934, while in Europe she "began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India,".. "feeling in some strange way that there lay my destiny as a painter", as she later wrote about her return to India, in the same year. Soon she began a rediscovery of the traditions of Indian art which was to continue till her death. She stayed at their family home at Summer Hill, Shimla, for a while, before leaving for travel, in 1936, at the behest of an art collector and critic, Karl Khandalavala, who encouraged her to pursue her passion for discovering her Indian roots

      Subsequently she was greatly impressed and influenced by the Mughal and Pahari schools of painting    and cave paintings at Ajanta Caves