Ivan Aivazovsky

Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900) was born to Armenian parents in the Black Sea port of Feodosia in Crimea, and baptised Hovhannes Aivazian. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in Maxim Vorobiev's landscape class, graduating early with a gold medal in 1837. The Academy sent him to Europe in 1840; he spent two years in Naples and Rome and travelled widely before returning to Russia in 1844, when he was appointed official painter to the Russian Navy. From 1845 he lived and worked in Feodosia, where he died in 1900. He is regarded as one of the great masters of marine painting. A Romantic by temperament, he kept to that manner even as Russian art turned towards realism, which left him open to criticism. He produced some 6,000 pictures in a career of almost sixty years, the great majority of them seascapes, reportedly painted from memory rather than from nature. He also painted battle scenes and Armenian subjects, and held solo exhibitions across Europe and in the United States. Here: The Ninth Wave.