One of the greatest nautical painters in history

October 24, 2015 6:59 AM

Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900) - "In 1840, Aivazovsky traveled to Rome, where he became friendly with Nikolai Gogol. He also received high praise from the Roman critics, newspapers, and even Pope Gregory XVI. The pope purchased Aivazovsky's 'Chaos' and hung it in the Vatican...

Aivazovsky frequently compared his work to that of a poet. "The artist who only copies nature becomes a slave to nature. The motions of live elements are imperceptible to a brush: painting lightning, a gust of wind or the splash of a wave. The artist must memorize them. The plot of the pictures is composed in my memory, like that of a poet; after doing a sketch on a scrap of paper, I start to work and stay by the canvas until I've said everything on it with my brush."

Aivazovsky's greatest masterpiece is considered to be "The Ninth Wave,"[1,2] executed in 1850. An early dawn after a night storm, the first rays of light touch the surface of the raging ocean and the fearsome ninth wave is ready to crush a small group of people struggling for their lives among the wreckage. Although the situation seems desperate, the picture still leaves the viewer with a glimmer of hope – it's full of light from the rising sun that brings yet another day.

Dostoevsky was an admirer of Aivazovsky's art and "The Rainbow" was his favorite work. It marked the first time in Russian art that a painter had created a scene of a storm as if seen from inside the raging sea. Dostoevsky wrote, "This storm by Aivazovsky is fabulous, like all of his storm pictures, and here he is the master who has no competition. In his storms there is the thrill, the eternal beauty that startles a spectator in a real life storm."

In 1898 Aivazovsky created "Among the Waves," the painting that is recognized as the pinnacle of his art. In it a thunderstorm rages above the boiling sea. There is no debris or destroyed ships or any other usual tricks of drama and tension; the waves crushing against one another create an extremely powerful image. It is one of the few canvases the artist never exhibited, bequeathing it instead to his art gallery in Feodosia.

"Joseph M.W. Turner, who himself is known for his marine paintings, saw Aivazovsky's 'The Bay of Naples on a Moonlit Night' in 1842 and was so struck that he wrote a rhymed poem (in Italian) to Aivazovsky:

In this your picture
I see the moon, all gold and silver.
Reflected in the sea below...
And on the surface of the sea
There plays a breeze which leaves a trail
Of trembling ripples, like a shower
Of fiery sparks or else the gleaming headdress
Of a mighty king!
Forgive me if I err, great artist,
Your picture has entranced me so,
Reality and art are one,
And I am all amazement.
So noble, powerful is the art
That only genius could inspire!

"In 1895, Aivazovsky was so devastated by the massacres of Armenians ordered by Sultan Abdulhamid that he threw into the sea the medals he had received from the sultan."

posted by kliuless (10 comments total)

It's really a shame that Aivazovsky isn't better-known outside of Russia. When I saw some of his paintings at the Tretyakov on a trip to Moscow, I was so struck by the way he captured the power of the sea that I spent the rest of my trip searching (ultimately successfully) for a book of his paintings.
posted by Guernsey Halleck at 7:39 AM on October 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Great post; I never really appreciated Aivazovsky before!
posted by languagehat at 7:40 AM on October 24, 2015

Thanks for putting all this together. I'd never have heard of him. I'm really looking forward to the Turner show in Toronto next week.
posted by bonobothegreat at 7:58 AM on October 24, 2015

Fantastic post!
i am a huge Turner fanboy, and I am devouring these links.
(p.s sidenote but oh boy turner was an awful poet, amazing artist, terrible poet)
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 8:27 AM on October 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thanks for all these links, kliuless - I only first heard about Aivazovsky thanks to a previous post about him here in 2013.
posted by misteraitch at 10:21 AM on October 24, 2015

Given my love of Turner, this fits firmly into my wheelhouse. Thanks!
posted by Kitteh at 12:39 PM on October 24, 2015

Aivazovsky is totally great.
posted by LobsterMitten at 6:03 PM on October 24, 2015

This is really, really wonderful stuff. I'd like to get some of these prints framed. Thanks for introducing me to something new that I'll be spending a lot of time researching!
posted by SpacemanStix at 10:04 PM on October 24, 2015

for jmwt fans mike leigh's biopic is pretty great! i know very little of art history, but i used to watch a lot of movies at the NGA and would sometimes stroll thru the galleries and, besides bierstadt's lake lucerne, my favorite paintings were turner's dogana and keelmen, but i knew nothing about him or his other work until the gallery's 2007 turner exhibit, which was eye-opening and revelatory to me; i must have gone to see it four or five times, and i started to get more into history as a result, coinciding with the queen's visit to jamestown (w/terrence malick's the new world ;) and steven johnson's the invention of air.

anyway, so as not to turn this into a turner thread, i have muzei showing art on my phone and i saw aivazovsky's ninth wave on it one day and it just blew me away; it was so _luminous_. i immediately went to check to see if he'd interacted with turner and wasn't disappointed, while learning about all the other interesting people he'd met, places he traveled and experiences he had. as a window into the times i think he'd make a great subject for a biopic in his own right, esp if leigh were up for a 'sequel' :P like chekhov said:

Aivazovsky himself is a hale and hearty old man of about seventy-five, looking like an insignificant Armenian and an bishop; he is full of a sense of his own importance, has soft hands and shakes your hand like a general. He's not very bright, but he is a complex personality, worthy of a further study. In him alone there are combined a general, a bishop, an artist, an Armenian, an naive old peasant, and an Othello.

I'm really looking forward to the Turner show in Toronto next week.

i saw it at the de young; it's just his later stuff but of course that's some of his best work! (i also never noticed it before but i like how he'd place little dogs in the foreground of a lot of his paintings :)
posted by kliuless at 10:40 PM on October 24, 2015

I'm really looking forward to the Turner show in Toronto next week.

I reserved tickets for that for my birthday in late November. I am 99.9% sure that I have already seen these at the Tate but I don't care. I will happily spend time with them again.
posted by Kitteh at 10:34 AM on October 25, 2015