Important Notice

Amrita Sher-Gil showed an inclination for exploring feminine themes from a young age. She was drawn to depicting women "in an emotionally charged and sensuous manner." (Artist quoted in Vivan Sundaram ed., Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self Portrait in Letters & Writings, Volume 1, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2010, p. xl) Her early works showcase an artist on the verge of realising her artistic strengths. She was yet to discover the synthesis of form... Amrita Sher-Gil showed an inclination for exploring feminine themes from a young age. She was drawn to depicting women "in an emotionally charged and sensuous manner." (Artist quoted in Vivan Sundaram ed., Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self Portrait in Letters & Writings, Volume 1, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2010, p. xl) Her early works showcase an artist on the verge of realising her artistic strengths. She was yet to discover the synthesis of form and colour seen in her later work, but nonetheless, her portrayals from this time evoke a sense of haunting beauty. Her fondness for portraying female figures and relationships would remain with her throughout her career, manifesting in later oil paintings where the women she depicted were "handled with great sensitivity and not with superficial pity or condescension." (Yashodhara Dalmia, Amrita Sher- Gil: A Life, New Delhi: Penguin, 2006, p. 20)

The present lot, a self-portrait rendered using pencil on paper exudes this rather reflective quality seen in her renditions of women. It is also testament to her deep interest in portraiture. This interest took hold during her adolescent years when she worked on several drawings of herself and other live models, paying particular attention to details such as anatomical frame, facial structure, and the overall proportions of a person's features. "These pencil sketches dated 1927 demonstrate a raw energy and the redrawing/reworking of contours as a corrective means to attain visual accuracy in her depictions of the self. The same page has been used frequently to capture two or three postures tried out with some shift in the angle of perception." (Roobina Karode and Rakhee Balaram, Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941): The Self in Making, New Delhi: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2014, p. 10) She would develop these skills further once she moved to Paris to study art in 1929. "From 1930 to 1932, Amrita did hundreds of sketches and studies of male and female nudes, mainly in charcoal. In these academic drawings the volume is emphasised by shading, and the energetic sweep of the line creates heavy, massive figures." (Sundaram Amrita seated at a bay window, c. 1932, 11 Rue Bassano, Paris ed., p. 10)

Sher-Gil's interest in self-portraiture, in particular, was so deep that she painted 19 self-portraits over the course of her brief career. She explored "a range of artistic styles and projections of the self" in them. While the self-portraits were primarily academic exercises, they also allowed Sher-Gil to "experiment with shifts in mood, clothing and character, and nineteenth-century artistic styles. This permitted her to use the self-portrait, as did many other artists before her, as a personal exercise without the requirement to satisfy patron or friends." (Karode and Balaram, p. 20)

On the reverse of the present lot, a young girl is depicted seated on a woman's lap, holding a shoe. An accompanying inscription reads 'The Red Shoe,' referring to the eponymous fairy tale by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen about a young girl who puts on a pair of red shoes against the warnings of her elders, and finds herself unable to stop dancing until she is dead. Sher-Gil, who had been home-schooled in English and French along with her sister Indira, was well versed in European children's literature. In fact, her earliest subjects ranged from coloured illustrations of "Hungarian folk stories and fairy tales by the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen" during her school years at Dunaharaszti, Hungary to painting impressions of female characters from films and novels. (Sundaram ed., p. xxxvi)

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