Virtual museum · 12 works
The Hall of the Sea
Ivan Aivazovsky 1817–1900
Հովհաննես Այվազովսկի
Hovhannes Aivazian was born in 1817 in Feodosia, on the Crimean coast, to an Armenian family, and he died there eighty-three years later. In between he painted the sea some six thousand times.
He rarely painted it from life. He watched, memorised, and worked in the studio, because, he said, the movement of water and light is too quick for a brush to follow. That is why his storms feel remembered rather than observed: the light is always a little too perfect, the wave a little too tall.
He kept close ties to the Armenian world all his life: his brother Gabriel was a monk of the Mekhitarist order in Venice, and he visited Armenia in 1868, painting Ararat and Lake Sevan.
Hanging the paintings…
- Drag to look around
- Click the floor to walk there
- Click a painting to step closer
- WASD or the arrow keys to walk, scroll to step
Drag to look · click the floor to walk · click a painting to step closer
Your browser cannot show the 3D hall, so here are its works as a simple gallery.
Survivors of a shipwreck cling to a broken mast after a night of storm. Sailors used to say the ninth wave in a series is the biggest, and one is rising now. But the sun has broken through, and everything is drowned in warm gold. It is his best-known painting, and it is about hope as much as about danger.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Its full title is "A storm begins to brew on the Black Sea". There is no ship, no shore, no figure, nothing but water and sky about to turn. Ivan Kramskoy called it one of the grandest paintings he knew.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
One of the great storms of his old age, painted when he was past eighty. The horizon has gone; there is only churning water, a torn sky and a single break of light. He kept it in Feodosia, in the gallery he gave to his town.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Lord Byron spent the winter of 1816 learning Armenian with the monks of San Lazzaro, the Armenian island in the Venetian lagoon. Aivazovsky knew the island well: his brother lived there as a monk. He painted the scene in 1899, a year before his own death.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Painted in Italy at twenty-four: the first day of the world, light breaking over a dark sea, a figure barely there in the radiance. Pope Gregory XVI is said to have admired it so much that he gave the young painter a gold medal. It stayed with the Armenian monks of San Lazzaro.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
His famous moons were built in thin, glowing glazes laid one over another, so the light seems to come from inside the canvas. Stand close and the path on the water starts to shimmer.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Aivazovsky travelled to Constantinople many times and painted for the Ottoman court. Here the city is a skyline of domes and minarets dissolving into evening haze, the Bosphorus busy with sails.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A small, quick picture, barely larger than a postcard. The whole of his night palette is here at pocket size: a black hull, a silver moon and one bright line of reflection.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Cape Aya is a headland on the Crimean coast near Balaklava. A tall picture for a storm, which is unusual: the eye climbs from the surf to the wind-torn sky.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
From his Italian years, 1840 to 1844, when he travelled the coast from Venice to Naples and became famous across Europe. Calm water, a far shore in haze, the warm air of the south.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
The Gospel scene as only a marine painter would paint it: the figure of Christ is a small source of light in the middle of a heaving sea, and the sea gets the canvas.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
In 1829 the small brig Mercury, eighteen guns, was caught by two Ottoman ships of the line and fought her way free. As Main Painter of the Navy Staff, Aivazovsky returned to the story more than once; here he paints it as a duel of sails and smoke.
Image: Wikimedia Commons