Sarkis Katchadourian

Sarkis Katchadourian gave his eye and his years to saving the island’s oldest painting. An Armenian artist who worked across India and Ceylon, he spent four years copying and, where it had almost vanished, reconstructing the ancient cave and rock frescoes of the two countries, the Sigiriya paintings of the fifth century among them.

His replicas were shown in the West, at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943, and brought the fragile splendour of the classical frescoes to audiences who would never see the rock itself. Long after his death, his widow gave his copies of the Ceylon frescoes to the national gallery of Armenia. He belongs to the island’s record less as a maker of new pictures than as a keeper of its most ancient ones.