Previously titled Malay Lady in Green, the Indian woman in this portrait is more likely a member of the modern South African Indian community of Natal (now Kwa-Zulu Natal), who arrived from the Indian sub-continent from the 19th century onwards, initially as indentured labourers to work on the sugarcane plantations of Natal Colony and later as traders. While the date on the canvas is ambiguous and could read as 1930 or 1936, the work is far more representative of the artist’s more mature style of the mid-1930s, after her seminal 1931 stay on Madeira. An exhibition at the Durban Art Gallery brought Stern back to Durban in 1935 (she had visited Natal twice in the 1920s), and she writes in her letters to the Feldmans of her frustration at not finding the Zululand of yesteryear, “this is my last trip trying to find things that are dying out” (letter to Richard and Freda, 25 February 1935). Instead, she evidently found inspiration in the women of Indian ancestry living along the East African coastline. The Green Sari compares closely, both in subject matter but also in the sophisticated use of impasto and mastery of colour, to Indian Woman 1936, illustrated in Arnold 1995 (p.59) and sold at Stephan Welz & Co in association with Sotheby’s in 2007 for $1 million, at that time a world record for a South African artwork. Woman with orange, also erroneously dated to 1930, previously in the Freda Feldman collection and sold in Johannesburg in 2017, provides an interesting comparative study in its experimentation with a myriad of greens as well as the same use of verdant foliage behind the sitter, so representative of the tropical Natal landscape, and so literally further described in Natal landscape 1936, in the collection of the Irma Stern Trust. The Green Sari is a dignified portrait, the sitter’s fine green sari, earrings and necklace suggest she is a woman of some social standing, and painted with the bold handling of paint and colour that is so characteristic of Stern's mature style.