He painted some six thousand pictures, and almost all of them are the sea: waves, storms, sunsets, shipwrecks, the moon over water. Critics in his lifetime said: too much, too fast, too showy. Today his works sell at auction for tens of millions.
Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky was born in 1817 in Feodosia, into the family of an Armenian merchant. He had known the sea since childhood and understood at once that it would be his one and only subject. At the Academy in St. Petersburg he studied under a fashionable French landscape painter, who was quick to admit that the student had surpassed the teacher.
In 1840 Aivazovsky traveled to Europe. In Rome, Naples, and Venice his pictures sold instantly. Turner, having seen "The Bay of Naples," said: "This man is not a painter — he is a genius." That is no legend; it is documented history.
The great riddle of Aivazovsky is light. He could paint light breaking through a wave so that the wave seems made of glass. Technically this is next to impossible. He found a way.
"The Ninth Wave" (1850) is his most famous work. Dawn after a storm. A few men on the wreckage of a mast. A wave the height of a house. Death is all but certain — and yet there is hope: the sky is brightening, and the wave does not swallow the light but is lit from within by it. Aivazovsky never painted tragedy without deliverance.
He lived to eighty-two and spent nearly all his years in Feodosia, where he founded a picture gallery, put up a building for it, and bequeathed it to the town. He was an honorary member of the academies of Rome, Florence, Amsterdam, and Stuttgart. Yet he counted as his chief service not his paintings but the Feodosia water supply, which he laid at his own expense.