Ivan Aivazovsky was a Russian painter of Armenian descent, born in Feodosia, Crimea, in 1817 and dead there in 1900. He became the official painter of the Russian Navy in 1844 and painted about 6,000 pictures, almost all of them the sea. He is remembered for The Ninth Wave, an 1850 canvas of shipwreck survivors at dawn, and for painting the ocean from memory in a studio that did not face it.
Most people arrive with one picture in mind, the wave about to fall on a handful of survivors, and with a question behind it: how does a man paint water that never holds still?
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The answer sounds like a trick. His studio in Feodosia, which he built in 1845, faced a courtyard and not the water. The sea in his pictures was put together in that room, from what he had seen and kept in his head.
The most repeated story about him is harder to pin down. In Italy, it goes, J. M. W. Turner was so struck by his moonlit view of the Bay of Naples that he wrote the young Russian a poem. The one scholarly article that tells it adds that the poem was in Italian and names no source. Even the place of the meeting changes from one account to the next, Rome in some and London in others.
So the best-known fact about Aivazovsky rests on a line nobody can show. What can be shown is the rest: a boy from a Crimean port who graduated from the Academy two years early, a pope who hung his Chaos in the Vatican, and a town that owes him its drinking water.
What You'll Discover
Who first noticed the boy's talent.
Why a pope hung his painting.
Why his studio faced away from the sea.
What the survivors are clinging to.
What he did when his town ran dry.
Which honors he gave up.