Home school hump day alert! This beautiful painting by the Indian-Hungarian artist Amrita Sher-Gil is a stunning study of girlhood, and if the atmosphere between its protagonists appears tense, that’s because it was. The child is Babette, the then-eight-year-old cousin of the artist; the woman, her mother. “It was a beautiful morning,” a nonagenarian Babette recalled when the painting went up for auction in 2018. “It was mummy’s idea… I was made to sit in the garden and pose [and I] absolutely hated it.” The art world, however, felt differently: the painting sold for over two million pounds, confirming its status as a masterpiece by “one of the harbingers of modernism in Indian art” (Sotheby’s).
