Jirayr Hamparzoom Zorthian () (April 14, 1911 — January 6, 2004) was an Armenian American artist. Biography Early life Born of Armenian parents on April 14, 1911, in Kütahya, Western Anatolia, Ottoman Empire, Zorthian escaped through Europe with the remnants of his family to escape the Armenian Genocide, and arrived in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1923. He earned a Master of Fine Arts at Yale University (where he had a "full college scholarship to the Yale School of fine arts") and studied art in Italy in the 1930s. Returning to the United States during the Great Depression, he painted several massive murals, including 11 for the Tennessee State Capitol in 1938 which earned him the honorary title of "Colonel". In 1940, he painted the mural at the United States Post Office in St. Johnsville, New York, titled "Early St. Johnsville Pioneers." World War II During World War II, he served stateside in army intelligence and painted what he came to consider his masterpiece—a mural he titled The Phantasmagoria of Military Intelligence Training. His training at Camp Ritchie makes him one of many Ritchie Boys. His first marriage, to shaving cream heiress Betty Williams, ended in divorce but he gained the first acres of the Altadena ranch where he lived from 1945 until his death. Friendship with Richard Feynman Zorthian is known among physicists for his friendship with Richard Phillips Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist. They met at a party where Feynman played bongos: Zorthian removed his shirt and made funny designs on his own chest with available materials. Zorthian and Feynman's attempts to teach each other physics and art respectively are described in Feynman's autobiography Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. Zorthian's work Zorthian, who earned his own kaleidoscopic descriptives as the last bohemian, a rustic latter-day Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or an ongoing work of performance art, died on January 6, 2004, of congestive heart failure. The nonagenarian's paintings, primarily of nude women that he said expressed "every man's fantasy," sold for tens of thousands of dollars. But Zorthian was perhaps better known in Southern California art circles for his free-form lifestyle than for his prodigious art. Each spring during the last decade of his life he threw a primavera birthday party, dubbing himself Zor-Bacchus, wearing a toga over long red underwear, and nibbling grapes from the hands of nude, garlanded nymphs (many of which were his artist models). Zorthian joined