Amrita Sher-Gil was a Hungarian-Indian painter. She has been called “one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century” and a “pioneer” in modern Indian art. Drawn to painting from an early age, Sher-Gil started getting formal lessons in the art, at the age of eight. She first gained recognition at the age of 19, for her oil painting titled Young Girls (1932).
A long forgotten and lost painting of Amrita Sher-Gil, titled Portrait of Denyse is now going for an auction. The painting is estimated to fetch about $2.8 million. The appearance of the work by the painter in an auction is rare as most of her paintings remains in private hold.
In the painting “Portrait Of Denyse”, the painter features her friend and art critic, Denyse Proutaux. In the painting, the subject is wearing a red velvet dress in front of vividly colored flowers. According to Christie’s, which is handling the sale, the oil painting was previously unknown to experts, having been in private collections in France since it was created almost nine decades ago.
The auction house reports that this painting is one of the four well known portraits of Proutaux. Using letters exchanged by the French art critic and her husband, as well as her correspondence with Sher-Gil and her sister, researchers were able to date the work to 1932, when the artist was just 19.
In the same year, Amrita also created the painting titled Young Girls. The painting also featured Proutaux as one of its model. The painting got her a gold medal at the prestigious Paris Salon art show. Sher-Gil would go on to be described as India’s answer to Frida Kahlo, merging Western influences, like Post-Impressionism, with elements of classical Indian art.
India’s government has described Amrita’s Paintings as National Treasure and has made it illegal to to take her art out of the country without permission from authorities. So, while paintings housed outside of India occasionally appear at major auctions, they remain something of a rarity on the international art market.
“With very few paintings by Sher-Gil still in private collections, it is truly a privilege to discover a painting by this talented artist that was previously unknown to her collectors and admirers, and to bring it to its full glory and offer it the world stage it deserves,” said Nishad Avari, a specialist in South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art at Christie’s, in a press statement.
The majority of the Sher-Gil work’s are now housed at he National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. In 2018, her 1934 portrait “The Little Girl in Blue” sold for 187 million rupees ($2.6 million) at Sotheby’s first ever Mumbai auction. Last year, a portrait she produced of her husband, Victor Egan, went under the hammer at Indian auction house Asta Guru for almost 109 million rupees ($1.5 million).
