From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Child Wife
Artist Amrita Sher-Gil
Year1936
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions76 cm × 53 cm (30 in × 21 in)
LocationSaraya private collection

Child Wife, also known as Child Bride (1936), is an oil on canvas painting by Hungarian-Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil (1913 – 1941). It measures 53 × 76 cm, and belongs to the Saraya private collection.

Composition

Child Wife is an oil on canvas painting depicting a young Indian girl sitting alone dressed in her bridal outfit. [1] [2] It measures 53 × 76 cm, and belongs to the Saraya private collection. [2]

Background

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913 – 1941), was a Hungarian-Indian artist. At the age of 12 years, in India, she witnessd a girl of age 13 years being married to a 50 year old man. [3] She completed Child Wife in 1936, the year after painting Mother India. [4] From her home in Simla, in a letter to her friend Denise Prouteaux dated July 1937, Sher-Gil told her that the painting is "too influenced by Gauguin. I am now getting away from his influence". [5]

Interpretation

Art historian Sonal Khullar interprets the Child Wife and Mother India as neither depicting rosy images of women, but they have a connection with Indian nationalist aspirations for reform in India. [4] She says that Sher-Gil's paintings of 1935 to 1936 "refuse to represent India as voluptuous, colorful, sunny and superficial"... "their dark, detached, and distant subjects critique nationalism's idealization of the masses". [4]

See also

References

  1. ^ Sundaram, p. 254
  2. ^ a b Sundaram, p. 805
  3. ^ Bhushan, Nalini (2020). "19. Amrita Sher-Gil: identity and integrity as a mixed race woman artist in colonial India". In Alston, Charlotte; Carpenter, Amber; Wiseman, Rachael (eds.). Portraits of Integrity: 26 Case Studies from History, Literature and Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 195–196. ISBN  978-1-350-04038-0.
  4. ^ a b c Khullar, Sonal (2015). "2. An art of the soil: Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941)". Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930 1990. University of California Press. p. 73. ISBN  978-0-520-28367-1.
  5. ^ Sundaram, p. 391

Bibliography