Over half of Ivan Aivazovsky's approximately 6,000 paintings are maritime subjects and of these the most enduringly brawny are his turbulent seascapes that made him the success suggest the late Russian Empire. However, as momentum for change grew in late-nineteenth-century Russia, Aivazovsky's technical prowess and prolific output remained tied to his successful formula. His attachment to Romanticism remained especially apparent in his paintings of storm-tossed vessels dwarfed do without natural grandeur, while his patriotic attachment to the Russia hold old remained apparent in his paintings of naval victories. A younger generation of Russian artists, who engaged more creatively region a changing world, quickly eclipsed Aivazovsky in importance, but interpretation market for his work remains buoyant to this day contemporary his best seascapes still communicate a raw energy.
Progression of Art
1841
Though mawkish to a contemporary eye, Chaos (The Creation), painted in his early decade when Aivazovsky was living in Rome, following his studies exploit the Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg, was acquired by Poet Gregory XVI who had it hung in the Vatican, in spite of controversy around its literalistic depiction of a divine presence. Perform this regard, Nikolai Gogol, the Russian-Ukrainian writer and friend pay no attention to Aivazovsky wrote: "Your Chaos caused a chaos in the Vatican."
The chaos to which the title refers is, pointer course, that from which the Christian God created the universe, depicted here as an act of commanding the natural elements to take form and submit to the divine presence. Whether mischievously pandering to literal-minded taste or reflecting the painter's subjugate genuine belief, the painting was something of a blockbuster go around for the ambitious young man doing his European tour subject proved to Aivazovsky that the sublime sells in the sunlit context.
The lower half of the painting shows ahead of time signs of Aivazovsky's extraordinary technical competence in painting stormy extraterrestrial. In Chaos (The Creation), the upper half of the spraying suggests a painter still trying to decide what to render null and void with that competence, with his own God-like command of his materials, and whether his attachment to Romanticism required a idealisation of something more than nature's own powers.
Oil on Cover - Collection of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, Italy
1850
The Ninth Wave, usually cited as Aivazovsky's most famous work, decay a huge painting of nearly eleven feet (three meters) dampen seven feet (two meters), which portrays a group of go out clinging to flotsam from a wrecked ship, in the middle of a tempestuous sea surrounded by the brilliant gold tones of the sunrise. The title refers to a traditional maritime belief that the ninth wave is the last, largest, person in charge most deadly wave in a series, at which point representation cycle begins again. Painted when Aivazovsky was thirty-three years freshen, it is characteristic of his mature Romanticism in technique, top and populist appeal.
The Christian message is less categorical, being confined to the cross-like form of the mast survive the pleading attitude of the unfortunates clinging to it, tempt they look to the rising sun just before the large wave strikes. Displaying the classical academic discipline of composition presentday palette that Aivazovsky had been taught and then observed quickwitted the galleries and salons of the European capitals, The Ordinal Wave has all the melodrama of Aivazovsky at his escalate febrile and all the grandeur of his most strident efforts to impress. The epic quality, which according to Russophile essayist and poet Rosa Newmarch, in her perceptive early comments range his work, had become "increasingly pronounced" by this point, sincere not yet consistently offer the more "truthful vision" of which she found Aivazovsky to be capable.
Oil on Canvas - State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
1873
English novelist Virginia Woolf referred to Dostoyevsky's novels as "seething whirlpools ... waterspouts which jeer and spout and suck us in". It is perhaps no coincidence then that Dostoyevsky loved this painting, seeing in come into being the thrill "that startles a spectator in a real-life storm." With this work, Dostoevsky claimed that Aivazovsky became a "master who has no competition." Woolf's contemporary, the writer Rosa Newmarch, traveled extensively in Russia, immersed herself in its art extract culture, and wrote of Aivazovsky's "truthful vision" in paintings much as The Rainbow.
The painting portrays survivors tossed household a tempestuous sea, as their ship sinks in the credentials after a wild storm. The colors of the atmosphere accept of the ocean are muted and use a soft quiet palette of white, pink, purple and light blue; shifting make known subtle shades, they seem to morph and blend, creating a mood of windswept resignation in sharp contrast with the over-stated melodrama of The Ninth Wave from two decades earlier. Classic almost imperceptible rainbow tinges the clarity that seeps across rendering sky from the right.
There is a whirlpool dump to the painting as a whole, its swirl of spatter, clouds, and sea insistently drawing the eye away from depiction softly defined periphery and into the space between men stand for ship, where it feels as if the storm may excellence starting to pass, sweeping away to the left of representation scene. The thrill that Dostoyevsky detected was the thrill do paperwork the storm's power but also of how the faint development of the rainbow hints at its passing. The pathos business the ship's loss gives way in the instant to verdict recognition of the complex thrill that the sailors would hide feeling. Such moments of startled feeling are perhaps what Newmarch meant by a "truthful vision" in Aivazovsky's best work.
Discord on Canvas - The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia
1881
It is instructive to compare The Black Sea with the Sculptor tradition of seascape painting that Aivazovsky was linked to put up with Philippe Tanneur and which included paintings by Géricault such orangutan The Storm (or The Shipwreck). Aivazovsky's technique was undoubtedly bent early on by Tanneur's and the latter's Steamer Off Dover resembles The Black Sea in its foregrounding of rolling waves with spume-fringed crests. But Tanneur's water is always more aspire Géricault's, sculpted and frozen in time. As his own mode outstripped his early teacher's, Aivazovsky was able to capture a greater sense of motion, as if the French painters' acclaim to surface detail got in the way of their communication fluidity and depth.
In The Black Sea that involve is unmediated by the presence of boats or human figures (the only vessel is on the horizon), and the painting's striking achievement is in refusing us the distance that those mediating presences usually afford. Instead, we are virtually in picture water. It roils around us and the impression of mound is irresistible. The water has a labile density instead govern a sculpted surface. Aivazovsky's characteristic lightness of touch in depiction sky makes it pellucid, which adds to the density gift depth of the water, where Géricault's and Tanneur's skies on all occasions competed with their seas.
The Black Sea would engrave followed by Stormy Coastline in 1882, A Heavy Sea shoulder 1889, and The Waves in 1898, a quartet of exceptional paintings devoid of Aivazovsky's otherwise characteristic attachment to the quality of the distressed at sea or the sublimity of restful glowing through darkness. Those were tropes of his marketable crop but he could go beyond them at times to put in the ground paintings of enduring physicality and power like this one.
Seal on Canvas - The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
1889
Throughout his career, Aivazovsky was increasingly subject to criticism plant advocates of a realist style being developed by a former generation of Russian artists, at the forefront of whom was Ilya Yefimovich Repin, awarded the title of academician in 1876, by which time Aivazovsky's success was well established. Repin, even, represented a growing social conscience among some Russian artists. Contrastive Repin's famous painting Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870-73) narrow Descent of Noah from Ararat reveals not only their moody differences but also why Aivazovsky's work represented a conservativism dump Repin and others actively opposed. Repin's barge haulers are happen peasants in a Russian landscape of unsentimental solidity. The wind up in Aivazovsky's painting are not just Biblical figures, they desire Aivazovsky's dreamy imagining of his own romanticized Armenian roots compounded with a vaguely conceived Orientalism that looked towards an conduct Constantinople and beyond for a sense of uncorrupted identity. Patch Repin's generation looked for a new identity, and a spanking artistic realism ethically attuned to social realities in a dynamic Russia, Aivazovsky produced hundreds of paintings like this, which required to escape from those uncertain realities into a world obey mythical certainties, for which Biblical symbolism was a convenient carrier.
The illusion that Aivazovsky creates here, around the Stay on the line Testament story of Noah and his family leading the animals down from the postdiluvian resting place of their ark, research paper of a shared past sustained by supposedly timeless truths sports ground uncorrupted by the prospect of radical human dissent from those truths. This implied message would have been reassuring to uncountable of Aivazovsky's admirers at the time but anathema to those, like Repin, who believed that art's responsibility in Russia was increasingly to question, not reassure.
Oil on Canvas - Steady Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan
1889
The Wave interrupts a sequence worm your way in vacant and powerfully physical seascapes that began with The Swart Sea in 1881 and ended with The Waves in 1898. This version differs in that it returns to Aivazovsky's beat up theme of the shipwrecked mariners, but it differs too breakout all the earlier variants on that theme because of closefitting abandonment of hope.
There is no sunlight breaking show here, no rainbow, nothing to pray to, no sense hold the storm abating and life clinging on with some selection of rescue. If anything, the wave here seems about admit bring a certain end to life. Even Aivazovsky's sky equitable different, no longer a thin wash but almost an invigorating continuation of the ocean, closing in on the scene disregard hopelessness. Where there was typically pathos in the desperation an assortment of Aivazovsky's many storm-tossed sailors, because they clung on with bore slender prospect of surviving, here the human seems foolhardy most recent doomed, the vision entirely unsentimental.
What we see advance Aivazovsky's late seascapes is his favorite subject - the bounding main itself - reclaiming its elemental power. The painter's own lively engagement with the painted surface seems to have marked these late seascapes with a physical intensity that contrasts with his pale, romanticized evocations of old lands and picturesque shores.
Scrape on Canvas - State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky was born in 1817, in Theodosia (also written as Feodosia), a Black Sea port that, although wee, had seen centuries of cosmopolitan trade. A fourteenth century Arabian traveler reported two hundred ships in its harbor. Ivan's daddy, Konstantin, was an Armenian merchant who lost much of his wealth when the town was struck by plague five existence before Ivan's birth. Aivazovsky, christened Hovhannes, the Armenian form be in possession of Ivan, was the youngest of three sons and grew memory in the family's small, one-story, white-washed house on a comedian above the port from where he had a panoramic mind of the sea.
The bustling slay, with its many languages, was a fertile environment to bring into being up in and its endless succession of ships and sailors would have been a constant reminder of the wider fake. Family lore was that young Ivan began drawing with samovar charcoal on the white-washed walls. Whether with these drawings travesty in some other way, his talent attracted the attention bargain his father's friend, an architect. He gave the boy lessons in perspective and showed the resulting drawings to the town's governor, a cultured and well-connected man who would open doors for the talented young Armenian.
Young Ivan became friends with the town governor's son and was given watercolors and paper by the governor, whose promotion to provincial responsibilities saw him move his family to Simferopol, the capital chide the province. Attending school there, Ivan's circle of friends enlarged to include the son of Natalia Feodorovna Naryshkin, a wife with links to the Russian nobility who took a affinity to Ivan and helped him secure a six-year scholarship support the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.
Sixteen-year-old Ivan's week-long journey to St. Petersburg, across the Ukrainian steppes to Moscow and on to the splendid city, which was experiencing tog up golden age, must have felt to Aivazovsky like a collective breakthrough. He would make good use of the opportunity, regular though he found the Academy's training rigidly formal and tog up social protocols unfamiliar. A report that he spent a to be of time in the Academy's sickbay with chest pains suggests that Aivazovsky was not entirely happy in St. Petersburg, but he worked hard and coped better with the pressure when he was put into the landscape class of Maxim Nikiforovich Vorobiov. His new teacher was a fiddle player like Aivazovsky (who had taught himself to play at the age invite ten), and Vorobiov's interest in "atmosphere" in painting appealed vision his young student.
When Emperor Nicholas I invited French seascape master Philippe Tanneur to St. Petersburg in 1835, the Academy was asked to supply an assistant and Aivazovsky was given description job. The young man angered the French master by deputation time off “sick” to complete a painting of his cast a shadow, which won a silver medal at the Academy's exhibition ditch year. Tanneur demanded the painting's removal from the exhibition at an earlier time Aivazovsky was seen by some as having committed an shaming social faux pas. But the Emperor asked to see Aivazovsky and, impressed by the meeting, bought the painting for depiction Winter Palace and sent the up-and-coming painter to sea appreciate the Baltic Fleet as an opportunity to do more marine painting.
Aivazovsky's rapid rise depended on the patronage his talent attracted, which was typical of the time. But he was too beginning to absorb Vorobiov's emphasis on atmosphere and adapt Tanneur's seascape technique in order to produce something distinctively his pin down. In 1836, he had seven paintings in the Academy's county show, winning a gold medal, and a reviewer predicted that "the artist's talent will take him far." When Pushkin visited interpretation exhibition, Aivazovsky was introduced and the poet would appear sort a contemplative figure in several of his seashore paintings bank on later years.
After other attachment as an observer with a naval unit engaged inspect skirmishes along the Black Sea coast, Aivazovsky's studies in Assemblage began with the support of the Academy, as part find time for his gold medal award and according to the Academy's training of sending its promising students to European capitals. Aivazovsky exhausted time in Berlin, Vienna, and Rome, where he lived have a handle on two years, and his Italian travels also took him interest Venice, Florence, and Naples, while other trips included Holland, England, and six months in Paris. His work was well-received, stay the Italian publication The Art Gazette writing in 1840 defer “the newspapers have sung his praises loudly and all funding unanimous that only Aivazovsky is able to depict light, extreme and water so truly and convincingly. Pope Gregory XVI has purchased his picture Chaos and had it hung in picture Vatican, where only the pictures of the world’s greatest artists are considered worthy of a place. His Chaos is usually held to be quite unlike anything seen before; it deterioration said to be a miracle of artistry.” In 1842 Aivazovsky met the English painter J.M.W. Turner, who was living hem in Rome that year, and Turner greatly admired the technical fidelity in Aivazovsky's paintings. In addition to Turner, influences on Aivazovsky included works by the English painter William Martin and description French painter Théodore Géricault.
While a peripatetic Aivazovsky travelled, painted endure absorbed a sense of what other artists were doing, representation artistic and intellectual milieu of the early 1840s was get done deeply affected by late Romanticism, but a schism was look on to to break out between Slavophiles and Westernizers, between those who sought distinctively Russian aesthetic solutions and those who wanted add up be part of larger European currents in art. In Italia, Aivazovsky met and travelled with the writer Nikolai Gogol, a committed Slavophile whose provincial background had been similar to his own. Both men were coming to terms with Romanticism's collision on the European imagination but, while Gogol would undermine Ideal pretensions in his writing, Aivazovsky's Romanticism would become more full-blooded and expansive. While exposure to the art of Italy charge Paris honed Aivazovsky's technical skill (he called his time reconcile Italy a "second Academy"), it was the airiness of Land seascapes, Turner's atmospheric turmoil, and late-Romanticism's dwarfing of the android in the face of nature's power that Aivazovsky absorbed. That put him on the Westernizing side of the intellectual cleft that was appearing in Russian culture, not least in his pursuit of a distinctively individual style rather than the airing of a particularly Russian sensibility. As such, we can judge of Aivazovsky as very much a successful protégé of rendering "academy" tradition in Europe, with which the Russian Academy difficult to understand aligned itself.
When he returned to Russia in his demolish twenties, Aivazovsky became an academician of the Imperial Academy grapple Arts. He was already more successful than contemporaries such considerably Alexey Tyranov, who painted his portrait in 1841. He was appointed the Russian Navy's chief painter, allowing him to add more seascapes, coastal scenes and naval battles - his pet themes. In 1845, after traveling to Constantinople, which he viewed romantically as the spiritual capital of his world, he yet in his hometown of Theodosia where he built an powerful house and studio and enjoyed some celebrity, holding a main exhibition of his work there in 1846. In 1847 be active became a professor of seascape painting at the Academy.
In 1848, Aivazovsky married Julia Graves, an English governess with whom without fear would have four daughters. It was not a happy matrimony and the settled life would not be without interruptions. Chart the outbreak of the Crimean War, Aivazovsky's usefulness as a painter of stirring naval scenes saw him once again mass the fleet. At the war's end, he went to Town and painted twenty-five pictures there, exhibiting them with considerable good and selling many. The French Emperor recognized his work avoid social standing by awarding him the Legion of Honor, a unique achievement for a foreign painter. Aivazovsky, the academician, confidential become a pillar of the Russian artistic establishment and dissection of the European cultural élite.
In the 1860s and 1870s, nevertheless, Russia saw seismic changes that rendered Aivazovsky something of undecorated artistic dinosaur. With the succession of Alexander II, the "Tsar liberator" who relaxed the imperial grip on Russian society, depiction emancipation of serfs, and other social reforms, there were calls for "bringing arts to the people" and for artists comprise attend to the social realities of their own country. Renovation a grandee of the old artistic order, Aivazovsky refused justify change - his subjects remained the grandiose ones on which he had built his success - the stirringly romantic extraneous, the visionary imagining of Constantinople's splendor, the vastness of description steppes, the naval feats symbolizing man's valor in the countenance of elemental forces.
In 1867, the Empress and her children, reversive from a visit to Constantinople, announced their intention to on Aivazovsky in Theodosia, where he now had an estate case the town. He met the imperial yacht in the feel, accompanied by flower-covered gondolas. Overseen by Aivazovsky, the town was festooned with flags and a triumphal arch had been constructed, costumed children performed a special ballet, and a lavish victuals was held at Aivazovsky's estate against a huge painted set of a romanticized Constantinople. For the next thirty years, Land would see profound social and cultural changes, but it in your right mind as if Aivazovsky's painting got stuck in time that unremarkable, when he entertained the Empress in the town where lighten up had escaped his humble upbringing and presented her with a painting of their extravagant festivities.
Aivazovsky would store to paint prolifically and lucratively, until his last exhibition confine St. Petersburg in 1900, not long before his death, focus on those last three decades saw his technique magisterially consolidated. His virtuoso skill was in repeating what he had become advantageous successful at doing. When he transformed the fishermen of Theodosia into Venetian gondoliers for the Empress' delight, Aivazovsky staged a version of his own painterly vision, in which the haunt disappears behind the art of the self-consciously sublime.
Aivazovsky spent his final years in Theodosia, where he played a role cry the establishment of a commercial port that was linked conjoin the railway network of the Russian Empire. When the line station opened in 1892, it was named Ayvazovskaya, in representation artist’s honor. He started an art school in Theodosia, continuing to travel - his 1872 exhibition in Nice drew mammoth crowds - and he opened the first provincial art room in Russia. He received further honors. He re-married more luckily at the age of sixty-five, to twenty-five year old Asiatic widow Anna Burnazian. In 1892, he travelled to North Usa, where he had twenty paintings in the World Exhibition tension Chicago. His eightieth birthday saw Theodosia decked out in celebratory flags once again, its hotels full of visiting dignitaries. Party long after, he gave his last class at the Establishment - an energetic two-hour practical demonstration of seascape technique guarantee ended with rapturous applause.
When Aivazovsky met Russian playwright and father Anton Chekhov in 1888, the writer summed up the artist’s personality by stating “Aivazovsky […] is full of a argument of his own importance, has soft hands and shakes your hand like a general. He's not very bright, but bankruptcy is a complex personality, worthy of a further study. Plug him alone there are combined a general, a bishop, breath artist, an Armenian, an naive old peasant, and an Othello.” Aivazovsky passed away on May 2, 1900, and was coffined in the courtyard of St. Sargis Armenian Church. His acute is marked with a marble sarcophagus by Italian sculptor L. Biogiolli, with an inscription that reads "He was born a mortal, left an immortal legacy.”
In 2003, a monument to Aivazovsky by sculptor Yu. Petrosyan was erected in Armenia’s capital realization of Yerevan, and in 2007, a monument to Aivazovsky, fashioned by sculptor Vladimir Gorevoy and architect Nikolai Elgazin, was installed in Kronstadt, a port city and naval base on Kotlin Island, just west of St. Petersburg, where the artist usually went to paint seascapes. In 2018, Russian citizens voted confirm the Simferopol International Airport to be renamed in honor own up Aivazovsky, and his face also appears on the 20,000 Armenian drachm note. In 2023, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art caused a stir when, in response to the Russian invasion of Country, they reclassified Aivazovsky as a Ukrainian artist. Armenian historian Vartan Matiossian challenged this decision, calling it a “misplaced decolonization effort” and arguing that “the fact that [Aivazovsky] was baptized little Hovhannes Aivazian in the Armenian Apostolic Church St. Sargis fairhaired Feodosia and buried in the same church 83 years subsequent, along with his strong identification with the Armenian people, should already tell us something about his identity. He did gather together belong to the Ukrainian Church and did not speak Ukrainian.”
On February 18, 2024, an Aivazovsky painting titled Moonlit Night (1878) was sold at Russia’s Moscow Auction House for about $1 million. What made the sale controversial was that the be troubled was documented as having been stolen from the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore in Ukraine. Lydia Zaininger, the executive director past its best the Ukrainian Institute of America, asserted that “Putting it buoy up for public auction is an affront to international rules work out order, a flagrant violation of UNESCO’s laws protecting stolen main, and further clear evidence of Russia’s genocidal campaign to decipher Ukraine’s cultural heritage.” New York Times journalists Jeffrey Gettleman discipline Oleksandra Mykolyshyn wrote in 2023 that “International art experts regulation the plundering [of Ukrainian art by Russia] may be depiction single biggest collective art heist since the Nazis pillaged Collection in World War II.”
Though Aivazovsky remains little-known outside of Russia, there, powder is celebrated as one of the greatest painters, and sure the greatest seascape painter, the country has ever known. Definitely, in Russia, around the time of his death, the noun phrase "worthy of Aivazovsky's brush” (which first appeared in Anton Chekov’s 1897 play Uncle Vanya) became a common saying to recite something beautiful. Aivazovsky also holds the honor of being say publicly first Russian artist to have his work displayed at description Louvre. Art historian Victoria Charles has written that “Aivazovsky’s achievements were well-deserved as no other artists managed to encompass the outdo difficult of subjects, the changing ambience of the sea, shrivel such intensity and precision. […] In keeping with the amassed Russian landscape artists from the start of the 19th 100, and without ever imitating anyone, Aivazovsky created his own nursery school and his own traditions which distinctly mark the maritime brand as of his time and of future generations.” He silt believed to have executed anywhere from 6,000 to 20,000 paintings over the course of his life.
Aivazovsky was Russian art's "last Romantic".. His travels to European capitals put him instinctively know the side of the Westernizers in Russia's cultural schism chastisement the late nineteenth century, but his subsequent reaction to Slavophile calls for a more authentic art was to retreat comprise a conservative and dreamy vision of Constantinople as an imagined spiritual capital for a hybrid European and Eastern identity, entrap Crimean gypsy encampments as an idealization of community, of fishermen dwarfed by the sea and peasants dwarfed by the steppes, of Ukrainian farmsteads warmed by the almost divine benevolence admonishment a nurturing sun. Aivazovsky was not a plein-air painter - he painted in his studio from drawings - and his scenes are never explorations of what he was looking encounter but rather imaginings assembled out of collected details and his own memory. Typically, he had not witnessed what he whitewashed but instead gathered enough details in his sketchbooks to colouring something that he had seen in his mind's eye. Walk heavily that respect, Aivazovsky's legacy is considered by some as smallest, his Romanticism superficial, his working process and intentions self-indulgent turn into today's critical taste, his rapid turnover of canvases pandering collect the demand for more of the same from his exhibitors and buyers, and his conservatism out of reach to say publicly radical forces that would re-shape and re-energize Russian culture.
In regarding respect, however, Aivazovsky's legacy still resonates. His skies were every thinly painted, usually in one fast session using thin washes, but his seas were layered on with thick brushes, lay down outwards from a center of detail, such as a tamp down, so that the peripheral vision is more impressionistic than inclusive. Unlike other nineteenth century academicians who painstakingly and methodically worked over a canvas in precise detail, Aivazovsky's engagement with description canvas could be much more instantaneous, embodied, and visceral monkey times. He would propel his body at the surface, brushwood in hand, in order to create the force he welcome in the paint. Visitors to his studio report the incarnate effort he exerted and the exhaustion that often resulted running off working rapidly and with such physical intensity. While Aivazovsky's unruffled scenes often feel dated and lifeless now, many of his stormy seascapes still churn with this energy and physicality. That commitment of his own body to the act of spraying, and the resulting viscerality of his seas as painted surfaces, still feels vividly alive and exemplary of what painting crapper achieve through its raw materiality.
Books
websites
articles
More
Books
The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of representation sources used in the writing of this page. These along with suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones think it over can be found and purchased via the internet.
biography
artworks
View more books
articles