J. H. De Rosen’s Unexecuted Designs for the Interior of the Armenian Cathedral in New York City

In 1967, when the construction of the Armenian Cathedral in New York City was nearing completion, Jan Henryk (John Henry) De Rosen, a Polish painter living in the USA since 1938, offered to decorate the interior of the new church with the scenes from Armenian history. He rose to fame as a mural painter in Poland in the 1920s, after he had decorated the Armenian Cathedral in Lvov (now in Ukraine), and apparently thought he was privileged to paint the New York cathedral as well. The negotiations with Armenians were conducted by Aleksander Janta-Połczyński, another Polish émigré and De Rosen’s friend. Although the designs were not executed, the surviving correspondence reveals interesting information about De Rosen’s social circle in America, including his acquaintance (or even friendship) with Sirarpie Der Nersessian, an eminent scholar of medieval Armenian art. An attempt was made to tentatively reconstruct the iconographic programme of the planned decoration.