Virtual museum · 10 works
The Tiflis Salon
Hakob Hovnatanyan 1806–1881
Հակոբ Հովնաթանյան
Hakob Hovnatanyan was born in Tiflis in 1806 into a family that had produced painters for five generations, back to the miniaturist Naghash Hovnatan in the seventeenth century.
He became the portraitist of Tiflis: Armenian merchants and their wives, Georgian princes and princesses, officers and churchmen. His sitters look out with a calm, enamel-smooth clarity, every jewel and thread of lace given the same loving attention as the face. It is portrait painting with the patience of the miniature behind it.
Later in life he moved to Persia and worked in Tehran, where he painted the Qajar court. He died there in 1881.
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Your browser cannot show the 3D hall, so here are its works as a simple gallery.
The Shah of Persia in full state, standing beside a cannon before a mountain landscape: the most formal portrait in the room. Hovnatanyan worked for the Qajar court in Tehran.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
His most loved portrait: a young woman of a Tiflis family, perfectly still, her face as smooth as porcelain. Everything that matters to him is here: the calm gaze, the jewelled headdress and fine veil, the plain dark ground.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A woman in festive Armenian dress: a veil over a jewelled headband, a heavy silver belt, a rosary in her hands. The costume is painted coin by coin, as faithfully as the face.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
One of the Tiflis merchants who were his first patrons. Hovnatanyan gives him the same frontal dignity a medieval painter would give a donor.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
From the Georgian aristocracy of Tiflis, who sat for him as readily as the Armenian merchant families did. A lace veil, long chains and a direct, level gaze.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A princess of the Chavchavadze family, one of the great houses of Georgia. The figure is set against darkness so that the face and the pearls glow.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Nerses of Ashtarak, Catholicos of All Armenians from 1843 to 1857, founded the Nersisian School in Tiflis in 1824, where generations of Armenian writers and artists were taught.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
An officer of the Apsheron infantry regiment in dress uniform, his medals and braid painted with jeweller's care.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A Georgian gentleman of Tiflis. The flat dark ground and the crisp contour come straight from the icon and miniature tradition the artist grew up in.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A Qajar prince in a dark uniform with a red-and-white sash, posed before a lake and mountains, from the Persian years.
Image: Wikimedia Commons