Amrita Sher-Gil was born on 30 January 1913 in Budapest, Hungary, to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, a Jat sikh aristocrat and a scholar in Sanskrit and Persian, and Marie Antoniette Gottesmann, a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer who came from an affluent bourgeois family. Her parents first met in 1912, while Marie Antoinette was visiting Lahore. Her mother came to India as a companion of Princess Bamba Sutherland, the granddaughter of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Sher-Gil was the elder of two daughters; her younger sister was Indira Sundaram (née Sher-Gil), born in March 1914), mother of the contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram. She spent most of early childhood in Budapest. She was the niece of Indologist Ervin Baktay. Baktay noticed Sher-Gil’s artistic talents during his visit to Shimla in 1926 and was an advocate of Sher-Gil pursuing art. He guided her by critiquing her work and gave her an academic foundation to grow on. When she was a young girl she would paint the servants in her house, and get them to model for her. The memories of these models would eventually lead to her return to India.

Her family faced financial problems in Hungary. In 1921, her family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla, India, and Sher-Gil soon began learning piano and violin. By age nine she, along with her younger sister Indira, was giving concerts and acting in plays at Shimla’s Gaiety Theatre at Mall Road, Shimla. Though she was already painting since the age of five she formally started learning painting at age eight. Sher-Gil started getting formal lessons in the art by Major Whitmarsh, who was later replaced by Beven Pateman. In Shimla Sher-Gil lived a relatively privileged lifestyle. As a child, she was expelled from her convent school for declaring herself an atheist.

In 1923, Marie came to know an Italian sculptor, who was living at Shimla at the time. In 1924, when he returned to Italy, she too moved there along with Amrita and got her enrolled at Santa Annunziata, an art school at Florence. Though Amrita didn’t stay at this school for long and returned to India in 1924, it was here that she was exposed to works of Italian masters.

At sixteen, Sher-Gil sailed to Europe with her mother to train as a painter at Paris, first at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Pierre Vaillent and Lucien Simon (where she met Boris Taslitzky) and later at the École des Beaux-Arts (1930–34). She drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, while working under the influence of her teacher Lucien Simon and the company of artist friends and lovers like Tazlitsky. While in Paris she is said to have painted with a conviction and maturity rarely seen in a 16-year old.

In 1931 Sher-Gil was briefly engaged to Yusuf Ali Khan, but rumors spread that she was also having an affair with her first cousin and later husband Victor Egan. Her letters reveal same-sex affairs.