Virtual museum · 9 works
The Hall of Legends
Vardges Sureniants 1860–1921
Վարդգես Սուրենյանց
Vardges Sureniants was born in 1860 in Akhaltsikhe and trained in Moscow and Munich. He was one of the first Armenian painters to turn to the country's history and legends as a subject: the queen Semiramis and the king Ara, the ruins of Ani, the queens of Cilicia.
He was a man of the theatre and of books as much as of the easel: an illustrator of the Shahnameh and of Pushkin, a stage designer, a translator. His paintings borrow from Persian miniatures and from Art Nouveau, flat patterns and jewelled colour framing a story.
He died in Yalta in 1921 and is buried at the Armenian church of St Hripsime there, which he had helped to decorate.
Hanging the paintings…
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Your browser cannot show the 3D hall, so here are its works as a simple gallery.
In the legend told by Movses Khorenatsi, the Assyrian queen Shamiram wanted Ara, king of Armenia; he refused her, and died in the war she waged for him. Here she sits beside his body in a carved stone hall, waiting for the gods to bring him back. It is his best-known painting.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Zabel, the thirteenth-century queen of Cilician Armenia, fled after the death of her first husband and was brought back to the court. Sureniants stages the moment like a scene from an opera, all brocade and gold.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A woman in mail and a long robe stands beside her horse, shield in hand: half chivalric romance, half Art Nouveau poster. Sureniants loved heroines, and gave them the centre of the picture.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
The poet Ferdowsi presents his epic to Mahmud of Ghazni. Sureniants illustrated the Shahnameh himself, and this canvas has the flat, jewelled order of a Persian miniature blown up to the size of a wall.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
The biblical dancer as the turn of the century imagined her: ornament, veils and danger. A favourite subject of the Symbolists, here given an Eastern setting.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Ani, the medieval capital of a thousand and one churches, was already a field of ruins when Sureniants painted there. He brings it back to life for a moment: women in white stepping out of a church into the light.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A musician plays for the women of a harem leaning from a balcony above him. The tiles, the carpets and the light are painted with the patience of an Orientalist; the faces are full of wit.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
The face of Christ imprinted on a cloth, an image with a long history in Armenian tradition. Small and quiet among the legends around it.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A man in a blue suit and pince-nez, hands behind his back, against a pale ground. Sureniants painted few portraits; this one has the stillness of a figure on a stage before the lights come up.
Image: Wikimedia Commons