Amrita Sher-Gil husband painting shows her Hungarian husband – who was also her cousin – in uniform and was painted in 1939
MUMBAI: Renowned Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting of her Hungarian husband Victor Egan has been sold for a whopping Rs 10.86 crore (about 110 million rupees) at an online auction by Indian art house AstaGuru.
Famous Indian art collector Manoj Israni snapped up the portrait.
Victor Egan was a Hungarian-born doctor who was also Amrita’s cousin.
The portrait shows him in his uniform and this painting was Amrita’ parting gift to his family when the couple decided to move to India from Hungary in 1939
AstaGuru said there was impressive bidding for the Amrita Sher-Gil husband painting at its ‘Modern Indian Art’ online sale.
“They (Amrita and her husband) shared a spiritual bond, which inspired her to capture his presence in glory,” AstaGuru said.
“The rare artwork without a doubt showcases her proficiency as a portraiture artist, and elucidates Amrita Sher-Gil’s academic training,” the auction house said.
Known for her insatiable sexual appetite, Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in Hungary in January 1913. Her mother was Jewish opera singer Marie Antoniette Gottesmann and her father was Sikh aristocrat Umrao Singh Sher-Gil who was known for his scholarly interest in Sanskrit and astronomy. The two had met in Lahore in 1912.
Amrita died in Lahore in December 1941 at the young age of 28.
Referred to as ‘the Indian Frida Kahlo’ — after the famous Mexican painter known for her self-portraits — Amrita had hordes of suitors in Lahore. But she married her first cousin Dr Victor Egan who had moved from Budapest to Lahore in 1939.
According to legendary Indian writer Khushwant Singh, who knew Amrita from Lahore, “She had countless lovers (in Lahore): her ravenous appetite for sex was legendary. She did not waste time in preliminaries. If her lover took too long to make the first move, she simply stripped and lay down on the carpet, naked. Badruddin Tyabjee gave a vivid description of his encounter with her one winter’s night in Simla.’’
Khushwant wrote in 2006 that sex was all that mattered to Amrita. In fact, “Amrita had threatened to seduce me just to teach my wife a lesson, but she couldn’t carry out this threat because she died a few months later,” wrote Khushwant Singh in his 2006 article in Outlook magazine.
Khushwant wrote that Amrita had reportedly married her first cousin Dr Victor Egan on the condition that she “would be free to have affairs with other men.”
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