Charles Fabri

Charles Fabri (18 November 1899 – 7 July 1968) was a Hungarian art critic, writer, and Indologist. He was a former curator of the Kern Institute Library, Leiden University, curator of the Lahore Museum, Pakistan, and later lecturer at the National Museum of India, New Delhi, before lecturing at the Architecture and Art Departments of Delhi Polytechnic.

Early life and education Károly Lajos Fábri was born on 18 November 1899 in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. He had one older brother and his father owned a chain of hotels. and accompanied Stein to India in 1932 to work on the Indus Valley excavations.

Lahore (1937)

Fabri became a British citizen in 1937. There, with the assistance of Diwan Chaman Lall, Fabri acquired The Little Girl in Blue and it remained in his family until being sold in 2018. He also assisted in the sale of The Vina Player to the Lahore Museum. In an essay he wrote after her death, he called her a "miraculous marriage of Indian and Western, brought up in the discipline of western painting, suffused in her mental make-up with Indian feeling and attitudes".

1938 onwards

Between 1938 and 1945 he was director of the Punjab Exploration Fund. Set in the 1930s it features a Lahore Museum director falling in love with a 23 year old painter based on Sher-Gil. Priyambada Mohanty Hejmadi