Sarkis Erganian

Life

Of Armenian descent, Sarkis Erganian was born in Trabzon and went to Constantinople to study art in 1884. In 1894 he went to Paris, where he took lessons from Jean-Paul Laurens and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. Subsequently he entered the Paris Academy of Fine Arts and became the pupil of Gerome. In 1897 and 1898 he participated in the Paris Salon exhibitions. He lost his father and brother in the Hamidian Massacres of 1894-1896, and in 1897 he sought refuge in New York city. He worked for a while as an artist for the New York Herald. He was awarded third prize for a work that was exhibited at the world fair in St. Louis in 1904, and won the right to American citizenship. He married around this time. He went on to participate in exhibitions in various American cities and won prizes. In 1905 two of his oil paintings were shown at an exhibition in Portland, Oregon. He became homesick for Turkey, and in 1912 he traveled to Istanbul, where he taught for a while at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi), predecessor of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. When World War I broke out in 1914 he decided to go to Tbilisi. There he spoke out against the Bolsheviks, and after the revolution in 1917 he was obliged to flee from Russia. He traveled to Istanbul and from there to St. Louis. In 1921 he restored the frescoes by Frederick Lincoln Stoddard in the St. Louis City Hall. He spent the rest of his life in St. Louis, where he is buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery. Many of his paintings are in collections in the city.