Works by Ivan Aivazovsky

Ivan Aivazovsky, official painter to the Russian Navy, painted the sea for some sixty years, from Naples sunsets to warships under full sail, and by one account always from memory.

His parents were Armenian and his home was the Crimean port of Feodosia; he trained in Maxim Vorobiev's landscape class at the capital's Imperial Academy of Arts, then studied in Italy and travelled in Europe in the early 1840s. In The Bay of Naples, dated 1844, the sun goes down in a salmon-pink sky over pale water, and a few figures stand on the beach by a stall rigged with a sail.

Back in Russia in 1844 he was named the navy's official painter of seascapes and sea battles, and from 1845 he lived in Feodosia, in a house and studio he had built there. Sea and ships fill most of the paintings below, with beaches, sunsets and the odd harbour town. Brig “Mercury” Attacked by Two Turkish Ships, from 1892, sets the small brig between two far bigger warships, gunsmoke hanging low over blue-green waves. One writer praised the way he caught moving water and the sun and moon reflected in it. In Moonlit Night of 1878 a full moon breaks through cloud and lays a path of light over the surf, past a rowing boat, to a beach where small figures sit.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Feodosia National Gallery I. K. Aivazovsky, Golestan Palace, Finnish National Gallery.