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AMRITA SHER‒GIL
(1913 ‒ 1941)
Untitled (The Tinder Box)
Inscribed ‘The tinder box’ (lower centre)
Pencil on paper
9 x 12 in (22.6 x 30.5 cm)
Rs 25,00,000 ‒ 35,00,000
$ 37,880 ‒ 53,035
NON‒EXPORTABLE NATIONAL ART TREASURE
PROVENANCE:
Acquired from the artist’s family, New Delhi
Private Collection, Maharashtra
Hungarian born Amrita Sher‒Gil spent her early childhood in Dunaharaszti, a
village on the outskirts of Budapest. In 1919, she joined the local school and did
many drawings illustrating Hungarian folk stories and the fairy tales of Grimm and
Hans Christian Andersen. An imaginative child, Sher‒Gil also wrote many of her
own stories and poems, with illustrated sketches drawn in coloured pencils and
crayons.
The present lot depicts an illustrated scene from
The Tinderbox
, a dark fairy tale
by Hans Christian Andersen, about a soldier who acquires an enchanted tinderbox
that lets him command three monstrous, powerful dogs to fulfil his wishes. The
scene here depicts the soldier gazing at a sleeping princess, his love, whom he has
transported stealthily to his chambers with the help of one of his dogs.
An illustration from an 1895 edition of
The Tinderbox
Source: Alfred Walter Bayes, Dalziel Brothers
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons