Alice Boner (1889 – 1981) studied art in Brussels, Munich and her native Basel. She had her studio in Paris but was attracted towards India when she came across the works of Havell and others on Indian art. She met Uday Shankar, the noted Indian dancer in 1926 in Europe and accompanied him to Indian in 1927 CE. Traveling through the length and breadth of the country to study Indian drama, dance, costumes and other forms of art, she finally settled in Varanasi in 1936 in house on the Assi Sangam. She lived there for forty years up to 1978. She passed away in 1981.
Alice Boner was basically a painter and her paintings show
the influence of Hindu art. When she visited Ellora in 1947, she seems to have
intuitively discovered the basic principles of composition of Hindu sculpture
and architecture. When she was watching closely the image of Bhagavan Vishnu in
Cave XV, the mystery of composition was revealed to her as if in a vision in the
form of a diagram or a yantra. This was further supported by the discovery of a
palm-leaf manuscript in Odisha.
Alice Boner published her Principles of Composition of Hindu
Sculpture in 1962. She studied temple architecture and published Shilpa
Prakasha (1965 CE). Her work ‘New Light On The Sun Temple Of Konark’ describes
how ancient Hindu artists strictly followed the canons of architecture as laid
down in some texts which she happened to see in the palm-leaf script. Her
Vastusutropanishad on architecture is also noteworthy.