A new record was set last week with a work by an Indian painter at auction. Amrita Sher-Gil’s 1937 painting “The Story Teller” sold for about $7.44 million at a Saffronart auction in New Delhi.

The work depicts a group of women relaxing outside a house and a figure looks on from a nearby door.

The previous record was set a few days earlier by a painting by Syed Haider Raza that sold for $6.2 million.

Who was Amrita Sher-Gil – She has been declared a ‘national treasure’ by the Indian government

Born in 1913 in Budapest to an Indian Sikh aristocrat father and a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer mother, Sher-Gil was eight when she moved to Shimla. Although she was already painting, her uncle Ervin Baktai encouraged her to pursue formal training.

During her student days at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the early 1930s, she was greatly influenced by post-impressionism and bohemian culture.

Her works, according to press reports in India, include self-portraits and nude studies, as well as traditional influences derived from miniatures, Ajanta paintings and her travels in India.

One of the country’s leading painters, she died young at the age of 28 in 1941. She has been declared a “national treasure” by the Indian government, which prohibits her Indian works from being exported to other countries.