The charcoal drawings in the present lot-simple and direct-offer a glimpse into artist Amrita Sher-Gil’s practice in her early years when she was learning not just how to draw the body, but how to see it. The women in these studies aren’t idealised or ornamental. They rest, recline, and drift inward, candidly comfortable in their own skin.

Sher-Gil began her formal training in art at age 8, taking lessons in India under Major Whitmarsh... The charcoal drawings in the present lot-simple and direct-offer a glimpse into artist Amrita Sher-Gil’s practice in her early years when she was learning not just how to draw the body, but how to see it. The women in these studies aren’t idealised or ornamental. They rest, recline, and drift inward, candidly comfortable in their own skin.

Sher-Gil began her formal training in art at age 8, taking lessons in India under Major Whitmarsh and Hal Beven-Petman, a British portraitist associated with the Slade School of Art in London. Recognising her innate talent, Petman noted her remarkable ability to capture form with a single line. (Yashodhara Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life, New Delhi: Penguin, 2006, p. 18). Her development as an artist was also moulded by her uncle Ervin Baktay, an artist and Indologist, who visited the family in India in the summer of 1926. He encouraged Amrita, now 13, to “move away from her highly emotional early paintings and to draw from reality, emphasising structure rather than naturalism.” (Vivan Sundaram, “Prologue”, Amrita Sher-Gil A Self- Portrait in Letters and Writings - Volume I, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2010, p. xI) He also advised her to draw from live models, a technique she would go on to use throughout her artistic career. Sher-Gil would later acknowledge his influence, saying, “It is to you I owe my skill in drawing.” (N Iqbal Singh, “Amrita Sher-Gil”, 1982, Critical Collective, online)

It was on Baktay’s suggestion that Sher-Gil moved to Paris to study art at age 16. She enrolled at the Grande Chaumière under Pierre Vaillant in 1929 and, in the same year, gained admission to Lucien Simon’s atelier at the École des Beaux-Arts where she studied till 1933. Immersed in the bohemian atmosphere of Paris, “she learnt, for the first time, the mystery of the anatomy of the human form” and “discovered the significance of line, form and colour.” (Singh, online) Though her early work was shaped by European post-Impressionists and her training in Western academic realism under Simon, Sher-Gil’s gaze was always her own. Raised between Hungary and India, with a Sikh father who was a scholar and passionate photographer and a Hungarian mother who was also an opera singer, she learned early how to move between creatively rich worlds. She is especially remembered for her honest, nuanced portrayals of women, not aristocratic muses, but working-class, rural women and women in private, ordinary spaces. In doing so, she became one of India’s most influential modern women artists and the only woman among the country’s nine National Treasure Artists. Even in these early sketches, one is able to glimpse an artist learning to observe with tenderness, and to draw not what she was told to see, but what she truly saw.

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