Three Girls

Amrita Sher-Gil trained in Paris and could have stayed, but in 1934, in her early 20s, she went back to India, certain that her real subject was there. Three Girls, painted the next year, is one of the first things she made on that conviction. Three young women sit against a bare wall in warm-coloured clothes, hands folded, waiting. She gives them no story and no charm for the viewer, only a kind of patient endurance, women held inside lives they did not choose. The Paris polish is still there in the modelling, but the mood and the colour are her own. The painting won a gold medal from the Bombay Art Society in 1937. Sher-Gil had only a few years left. She died suddenly in 1941, at 28, her work barely begun.