“Tomorrow I will start the art school’s work. I paint at home and the fruit of my hard work is a very beautiful still-life.”
- Amrita Sher-Gil in a letter to Victor Egan, February 1931 (Yashodhara Dalmia, “Soliloquy”, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life, Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India, 2006, p. 4)

Amrita Sher-Gil held an unshakeable belief in her destiny as an artist. She once reflected, “It seemed to me that I never began painting, that I... “Tomorrow I will start the art school’s work. I paint at home and the fruit of my hard work is a very beautiful still-life.”
- Amrita Sher-Gil in a letter to Victor Egan, February 1931 (Yashodhara Dalmia, “Soliloquy”, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life, Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India, 2006, p. 4)

Amrita Sher-Gil held an unshakeable belief in her destiny as an artist. She once reflected, “It seemed to me that I never began painting, that I have always painted. And I have always had a strange certitude, the conviction that I was meant to be a painter and nothing else.” (Amrita Sher-Gil, “Evolution of My Art”, Yashodhara Dalmia ed., Amrita Sher-Gil Art & Life: A Reader, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 3) Recognising her talent at an early age, her family nurtured her artistic gifts and cultivated a cultured atmosphere at their home in Simla, where they moved from Hungary in 1921. Her father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, came from an aristocratic family in Punjab and was a Sanskrit and Persian scholar with a passion for photography and carpentry. Her Hungarian mother, Marie Antoinette, was a trained opera singer who maintained connections with several prominent artists, writers, and musicians of the time.

By age eight, Sher-Gil began receiving formal training in art under Major Whitmarsh and Hal Beven- Petman, a portrait painter who had previously taught at the Slade School of Art in London. Her maternal uncle, Hungarian indologist and painter Ervin Baktay, visited the Sher-Gils in 1926 and took notice of her prodigious talent. He strongly advocated for her to be sent to Europe to further her artistic education, and so in February 1929, 16-year-old Amrita and her family boarded the Austrian liner The Lloyd at Bombay, disembarking at Venice before continuing to Paris by train.

Sher-Gil’s five years in France laid the foundation of her remarkable career. The once solemn and bookish young girl thrived in the bohemian atmosphere of Paris. The family home on Rue de Bassano became a gathering place for artists, writers, and poets. Later, she moved to a shared studio at the corner of the Rue de la Grande Chaumière, close to the vibrant cultural hub of Montparnasse. With guidance from Jòzef Nemes, who was an artist and friend of the family, she enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Pierre Vaillant and soon won admission to Lucien Simon’s prestigious salon at the École des Beaux-Arts, where she studied till 1933. Although Simon’s teaching was rooted in academic realism, with an emphasis on still lifes and genre paintings, he encouraged his students to develop their own artistic voices. Reflecting on his approach, Sher-Gil noted, “Lucien Simon never ‘taught’. He made us think for ourselves and solve technical and pictorial problems ourselves, merely encouraging each of those pupils whose work interested him in his or her own individual forms of self-expression.” (Dalmia ed., p. 4)

The technical skills Sher-Gil honed during this time provided the necessary grounding for her mature canvases from the latter half of the decade, which would establish her as one of India’s most influential modern artists. Under Simon’s tutelage, she began working with oil for the first time and painted nudes, portraits, and still lifes. Writer N Iqbal Singh remarks, “She discovered the significance of line, form and colour. She fell under the spell of Gauguin and Cezanne... was full of admiration for Modigliani... and her one great love was Vincent van Gogh... Though full of admiration for all these artists, Amrita was never either derivative or initiative...” (N Iqbal Singh, “Amrita Sher-Gil”, Roopa Lekha Vol 53, New Delhi: All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society, 1982, accessed via Critical Collective, online)

The present lot from 1932 is likely a study she made during her penultimate year at the École des Beaux-Arts. While its style is largely academic, it also reveals Post-Impressionist influences, evident in the short, painterly brushstrokes and a strong, passionate sense of colour that became even more pronounced in her portraits and figurative works of the same period. The composition, featuring a simple arrangement of objects, may have been inspired by Paul Cézanne’s still life paintings, which often depict apples alongside bottles, vases, and pots. Interestingly, the red and green palette used in this painting appears prominently in many of her significant works from this period. Quoting Van Gogh, she once said, “I want to express with greens and with reds, the terrific human passions.” (Katalin Keserü, “Amrita Sher-Gil the Indian Painter and Her French and Hungarian Connections,” Yashodhara Dalmia ed., Amrita Sher-Gil Art & Life, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 87) The simplification of forms and elimination of non- essential details also presages the new artistic style she would later achieve after returning to India in the late 1930s. Influenced by Ajanta murals and Indian miniature paintings, this new approach became characteristic of iconic canvases such as The Story Teller, 1937, and In the Ladies’ Enclosure, 1938.

Sher-Gil earned several prizes for her still lifes at the competitions held at the École des Beaux-Arts. Though her primary focus was figuration, she often incorporated still lifes in many of her paintings from this time. Notable examples include Portrait of Denyse (circa 1930s) and Young Man With Apples (1932), a portrait of her friend and contemporary Boris Taslitzky. In Young Girls, 1932, she skilfully integrates a plate of cherries and a side table with a teacup and vase of flowers, painted with a spatial tilt reminiscent of Cézanne’s style. Considered to be one of her most successful works of her Paris years, the painting won her a Gold Medal and a position as associate of the Grand Salon in 1933 when she was just 19

The artist took immense pride in her early works and the accomplishments she achieved as a young woman in Paris. The present lot was displayed at the dining or living room in the Sher-Gils’ home and is one of the few still lifes that she refers to in her correspondence. In a letter to her parents dated August 1934 she writes, “...by the way, of the paintings in the drawing and dining room, you have my authority to sell the little composition in the forest, the little gypsy girl, & the still life with the bottles and apples against the window as background.” (Artist quoted in “India, Italy, France, Hungary, Great Britain: 1929 - 1934”, Vivan Sundaram ed., Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters & Writings, Volume 1, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2010, p. 143)

Sher-Gil produced fewer than 200 paintings during her lifetime; of these, only a handful are still lifes. Most of her major oil-on-canvas works are part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi, making the present lot a particularly rare work to come up for auction. This painting is a record of her extraordinary, burgeoning talent-remarkable for someone so young-during a period when she was truly finding her artistic voice. Just two years later, a yearning to return to India would signal an important turning point in her career. This transition marked a departure from the rigidity of academia and a merging of her European sensibilities with elements of traditional Indian art. Reflecting on her creative output during her initial years in Paris she wrote, “...although I went through an academic phase in the first few years of my stay in Paris, I had never imitated nature servilely; and now I am deviating more and more from naturalism towards the evolving of new, and ‘significant’ forms, corresponding to my individual conception of the essence of the inner meaning of my subject.” (Dalmia ed., p. 3)

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