A painter and watercolourist, he was born in Malatya (Turkey) in 1886. He graduated from the Sanasarian School of Painting in Erzurum and taught painting for a while in his home town.

He went to Istanbul and Aleppo in 1904 and then to Italy in 1908, where he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.

He then travelled to Switzerland and Germany, and lived in Paris until the outbreak of the First World War. Back in Armenia, he had to take refuge in Transcaucasia in 1915 to escape from the genocide. Those massacres then become one of the main themes of his work.

In the 1920s, he designed the first postage stamps of Soviet Armenia, and also painted the landscapes, feasts and misfortunes of his homeland.

He exhibited in Cairo in 1922, in Vienna in 1923, in Paris and Brussels in 1924, and then in London in 1925. In 1931, in Iran, he decided to depict the 16^th and 17^th century Safavid frescoes of the royal palace of Ali Qapu in Isfahan, before they were definitively lost into dust. He made some splendid representations of them which are serve as testimony to their existence. These reproductions are kept in the Louvre, Berlin, Glasgow, Stockholm, Cairo and in several American museums.

Shortly afterwards, for four years, he copied the frescoes of the underground sanctuaries of Ceylon and the Indies (6^th and 12^th centuries).

He also left us many portraits, including a portrait of his wife, Vava, who was also a painter.

Following a missed operation he died in Paris in 1947.

Frédéric Fringhian