Amrita Sher-Gil valuation
Hungarian-Indian painter who joined Paris training to Indian subjects and founded modern Indian painting before her death at twenty-eight.
Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in 1913 to a Punjabi Sikh aristocrat and scholar, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, and a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer, Marie Antoinette Gottesman.
What a work by Amrita Sher-Gil is worth
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Bio
Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in 1913 to a Punjabi Sikh aristocrat and scholar, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, and a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer, Marie Antoinette Gottesman. The family moved to Shimla in 1921, and after a short time at an art school in Florence she trained in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the École des Beaux-Arts, making her name with Young Girls of 1932. Returning to India in 1934, she turned to Indian subjects, village women, families and everyday life, in flat, warm colour that drew on Mughal and Pahari miniatures and the Ajanta murals. She married her cousin Victor Egan in 1938, moved with him to Lahore in 1941, and died there that December, aged twenty-eight.
Very little of her work comes to market. India has named her one of nine artists whose works are national art treasures, which may not be exported, and most of her paintings are in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. Works held outside India, and the documentation of how and when they left, are what make a sale possible.
Budapest, Paris and Lahore
Young Girls, painted in Paris in 1932, won her a gold medal at the Salon of 1933, and she was elected an associate of the Grand Salon.
Her late works, among them Siesta and In the Ladies' Enclosure, adapt the composition and colour of Indian miniature painting, and some of her paintings are in the Lahore Museum.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
