Portraits By Sarkis Diranian – Gallery

We all know the great Armenian painters like Ivan (Hovhannes Aivazian) Aivazovsky, Martiros Saryan and Arshile Gorky. But there are many amazing artists of the past and present who tend to be looked over. So every now and then I’ll write an article to bring these forgotten artists to the forefront and hopefully the public can appreciate their work. To kickstart these series of articles, I want to present the portraits of the 19th-century painter Sarkis Diranian.

Who Was Sarkis Diranian

Sarkis Damian was born in 1854 in Istanbul, Ottoman Empire and passed away in 1918 in Paris, France. He was an Armenian orientalist painter.  Later on in his life Damian moved to Paris to pursue his career in art and won the Honorable Mention in 1892 and another one at the Exposition Universelle (World Fair) in 1900. In 1927, Sarkis Diranian painted a portrait Governor Norman S. Case in the Rhode Island State House.

Brown University has one of the best collections of Sarkis Diranian paintings in the US. Between 1885 and 1895, portraits of Chancellor William Goddard and his wife Edith Jenckes Goddard, were both painted by Sarkis Dianian. They are still in the Brown University collection in Rhode Island along with Diranian’s other paintings.

historyofarmenia.org