Amrita Sher-Gil, half Sikh and half Hungarian, lived at Saraya in Uttar Pradesh and at Lahore, and died at Lahore in 1941 at twenty-eight. She is among the most important Indian painters of the twentieth century and her Punjab connection is usually mentioned and rarely examined.
Sobha Singh's devotional portraits became the standard images of the Gurus. Thakur Singh at Amritsar worked in a similar register.
Satish Gujral, born at Jhelum in 1925, deaf from childhood, painted the Partition series in the late 1940s, which is among the very few direct visual responses to 1947 by anyone who saw it. He later worked as a sculptor, muralist and architect.
The Government Museum and Art Gallery at Chandigarh, holding the Indian share of the Lahore collection, is the main public collection in the region.
Punjab has no significant contemporary art market, no major private museum, and its art school tradition, which produced Bhai Ram Singh and others at Lahore, was left on the other side of the line.
The Pahari and Sikh court traditions ended with their patrons, and what came after was a modern art school culture at Lahore and later at Chandigarh and Amritsar.
Amrita Sher-Gil worked in the Punjab in the 1930s and her paintings of village subjects are the bridge between the European training and the Indian material.
Sobha Singh's devotional images, the Chandigarh modernists and the Punjabi painters of the diaspora are three unconnected streams, and no gallery in Punjab holds a collection covering all three.