Amrita Sher-Gil is considered to be one of India’s most celebrated and gifted artists of the pre-colonial era. Born in 1913 in Budapest, she grew up in a cultured and intellectual family who initiated and supported her early interest in art. Her Hungarian-Jewish mother, Marie-Antoinette was a socially ambitious woman who was an accomplished pianist and singer. Sher-Gil's aristocratic Sikh father who was more reserved in temperament was a scholar of Sanskrit and Persian literature and a reader of Indian philosophy.

From an early age Sher-Gil had shown an aptitude for drawing. “It seems to me that I never began painting that I have always painted. And I have always had, with a strange certitude, the c...