Jirayr Zorthian

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.

Proudly, Zorthian offered his own down-to-earth appraisal of his art ranch for the Los Angeles Times in 1990: "This entire property has sort of been sculpted with a skip-loader. I have 40 more years of work. I don't have time to die. ... A lot of people my age have given up being curious or vital. Can you imagine me in a retirement home playing shuffleboard?"

Zorthian was equally at home attending posh art events in a tuxedo as in digging through restaurant trash cans for recyclable objects. He chaired the Pasadena Art Fair in 1954 and 1955 and staged a show of his work at what was then the Pasadena Art Museum in 1953.

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 the nymphs in dancing to the pipes of a cavorting Pan garbed in furry goat leggings. Alcohol flowed freely and a roasted pig fed hundreds of guests who could include scientists, movie stars, internationally known artists, writers and musicians and ordinary people. July 15, 1952, Zorthian hosted a legendary party on his ranch, where Charlie Parker played, a woman performed a strip tease atop a rocking horse, and other riled-up guests tore their clothes off.

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.

Zorthian and his wife, Dabney (March 21, 1933 – May 10, 2006), lived in a small pseudo-brick house on the ranch, well loved by friends as welcoming although very cluttered. The couple often preferred to sleep outdoors. They slaughtered their own livestock and made their own sausage, milked their own goats and made cheese, raised their own vegetables and gathered eggs from their chickens. As a young immigrant, Zorthian had been startled by how wasteful Americans seemed and vowed to recycle everything he could and to create his own self-sufficient environment, a trait he shared with rival/fellow castle-builder Michael Rubel.

Jirayr Hamparzoom Zorthian (Armenian: Ժիրայր Զորթեան) (April 14, 1911 — January 6, 2004) was an Armenian American artist.

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."