In the short years that Amrita Sher-Gil painted, an impressive body of work unfolded, leaving a legacy of incredible beauty. The daughter of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil of Majithia, she painted and drew ceaselessly even as a little girl. She was greatly encouraged by her uncle Ervin Baktay, an Indologist. Later the family moved to France where she studied art at the Grand Chaumieres and then the Ecole Des Beaux Arts. In 1933 she wrote: "I began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India ... feeling that there lay my destiny as a painter."

By the time Sher-Gil returned to India in 1934, her tremendous talent had been reinforced by a rigorous schooling, which though academic in nature already bore the signs of a passionate engagement with life. Sher-Gil had already moved towards post-Impressionism and beyond western academism as in "Hungarian Market Scene" and "Merry Cemetry" and in paintings such as "Young Man with Apples" and "Potato Peeler" which showed the influence of Cezanne, Modigliani and Gauguin.

In the context of the 1930s in India, the stunningly beautiful Sher-Gil was courageous in her personal life. Pursued by a small coterie of admirers, she made many brave choices for a woman of her times. She painted prolifically in her studio in Summer Hill in Simla despite the fact that both exposure and recognition were in short supply.

Now the veiled hill women in Simla who became her new models had the same stillness and poise of the earlier Cezanne-like work. She found in the villages of India the counterpart of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings. The figures were imbued with melancholy and often presented in the form of a tableau. They were devoid of action which seemed to reinforce rather than diminish the feeling of strength they conveyed.

The transition from the full-blown, sensuous portraits and nudes of the early European period to the austere images of rural India was as much a journey of self-discovery as a return to her Indian roots. Her mother wrote of Sher-Gil: "Her great ambition was to create something noble, permanent and significant."

Her visit to Ajanta in 1936 was a turning point. Here she saw painting in its "purest form", learnt to shun volume, reduce objects to flat planes and achieve the inwardness of ancient art. At this time she also discovered Pahari miniatures. In the years that followed, an extraordinary body of work was created, imbued with a contemplative beauty . Here for the first time the gap between western technique and an Indian sensibility began to close and a style emerged that was a fusion of East and West. It was at the time not considered avant garde but in retrospect is part of the very bedrock of the modern movement in Indian art. There seemed nothing self-conscious or deliberate about her experiments at assimilation or transmutation. My favourite Sher-Gil will always be the painting of two young nude women, one pink and pale with blue eyes and the other dark haired and brown skinned. This work seems to be the epitome of the two worlds which she inhabited.

The amazing thing was that Sher-Gil's own fiery, bohemian nature, (she was often emotional, critical, impulsive and aggressive in her arguments) should have achieved such control. Her paintings were so serene that they were almost motionless. Though they bore the marks of a certain stylisation, this was a far cry from the intense romanticisation of the rural condition as seen in painters such as Abanindranath Tagore or Chugtai who were already painting at the time of her return to India. She also distanced herself from the "Oriental Art Movement" in Santiniketan.

Some of her greatest work was done after her visit to south India. "Brahmacharis", "South Indian Villagers Going to Market", "Banana Sellers" and "Brides' Toilette" must be imprinted indelibly on the minds of Indian painters. These paintings established a new genre, a totally new way of using colour, far removed from the paler, brighter hues of the impressionist painters or the untempered, raw pigment used by Indian folk artists. She was an extraordinary colourist; the sonorous but rich palette often illuminated by brilliant whites and enlivened by a judicious use of small embellishments. She said, "Colour is my domain and I am on terms of easy domination with it ..."

Recently, in an age where aesthetics has become a dirty word in art, there have been those critics who perceive her work as too beautiful, too harmonious, elevating even the ugly to a state of equilibrium. But she must be seen as both product and maverick of her times. Her genius will continue to speak eloquently for itself.

After a brief marriage to her cousin Victor Egan who was a young doctor, Amrita died tragically in mysterious circumstances when she was only 28, an age when most painters are only just beginning to find themselves. She was perhaps unaware of her own greatness and the priceless legacy that she had left to Indian art.

Anjolie Ela Menon is a painter based in Delhi.