Amrita Sher-Gil was born in 1913 in Budapest to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil – a Sikh aristocrat, scholar, and self-taught photographer – and Marie Antoinette Gottesman, a Hungarian opera singer. The Head of a Girl (1937) follows the style of her later work, though the subject is not specifically Indian. The head and shoulders of a young girl with large almond-shaped eyes and an oval face framed by a heavy fringe bears an uncanny similarity to a black-and-white photograph of a young Sher-Gil taken between 1920 and 1924, possibly by her father. While she painted several self-portraits in the early years, there are none of her as a young girl, and though she does not ascribe it as such, it is likely that the photograph served as a reference for the painting. In 2007, the Tate Modern showed thirty paintings by Amrita Sher-Gil in one of its first major exhibitions of an Indian artist.
—Latika Gupta
