Ivan Aivazovsky is known as the best marine artist in the world, although he also painted other landscapes, battle scenes and many portraits. He is defined as a representative of romanticism, although there are many realistic elements in his paintings.
There are few artists who received such huge recognition during their lifetime as he did. He was named “Academician” of the Russian Navy, de facto State Councilor of Russia, de facto Privy Councilor of Russia, “Professor of Marine Painting” of the Petersburg Academy and its Honorary Member, Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science and Art, Member of Academy of Florence, Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, Honorary Member of the Moscow Art Society, etc.
Aivazovsky is the author of more than 6000 paintings, which makes him a real world record holder among the masters of the brush. The most interesting thing is that the world would not have seen a huge part of the paintings of this incredibly talented artist if he had actually died in 1843, when the ship he was traveling on in the Bay of Biscay was almost sunk by a terrible sea storm. In the commotion surrounding the shipwreck, newspapers ran headlines about Aivazovsky’s death, but he survived and lived for another 57 years after being declared “dead”. He died on May 2, 1900. The inscription is engraved on his sarcophagus:
“Born mortal, he left an immortal memory of himself.”
Ivan Aivazovsky was born on July 29, 1817 in the Feodosia region /a port on the Crimean Peninsula/, Russian Empire, in the family of Armenians. He has three sisters and one brother – the historian Gabriel Aivazovsky.
Young Ivan Aivazovsky received his first parochial education in the local Armenian church. Plays the violin, takes lessons from a local architect. He enrolled to study Landscape at the St. Petersburg Art Academy and while still a student received a silver medal for his paintings. He was assigned as an assistant to the French landscape painter Philippe Tanner, but a conflict arose between the two, after which Aivazovsky enrolled in the Battle Painting class and participated in the exercises of the Baltic Sea Fleet in the Gulf of Finland. From this period is his painting “Spokoystvie”, which won a gold medal and earned him a diploma from the academy, 2 years ahead of schedule. He left for the Crimea, where he met three admirals. With their patronage he was sent to study in Europe. Constantly travels: to Venice, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Naples, tours Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Great Britain, etc. He was strongly influenced by Italian painting and held several exhibitions in Italy.
He was invited to exhibit his paintings at the Louvre. Aivazovsky is the only representative of Russia at an international exhibition organized in the famous museum. He continues to travel – to Portugal, Spain, Malta. It was during one of these trips that he was shipwrecked and pronounced “dead”. After his “resurrection”, he was briefly in Paris and Amsterdam, and then returned to Russia.
The most fruitful period of his life begins. He became the official artist of the Russian Navy and initially painted commissioned views of Russian port cities. He also undertook a journey through the Greek islands of the Aegean Sea. After his return, he decided to settle in his hometown and build his own studio. He continues to paint marine paintings and is already very famous. He was raised by the Russian imperial court to the rank of aristocrat. In the meantime, he married an English governess, from whom he had four daughters, but in 1877 he divorced his wife and his second marriage was with an Armenian woman.
Creative success accompanied Aivazovsky throughout his life, but his real rise began sometime after the Crimean War, when he began to paint pictures of battle scenes. His works were exhibited during the Ottoman siege of Sevastopol. In the 1960s, he painted paintings inspired by Greek nationalism and the unification of Italy. For the first time, he went to the Caucasus, where he painted mountain landscapes. The time of his great international recognition is coming.
The Academy of Fine Arts in Florence asked the artist to create a self-portrait to be exhibited in the iconic Uffizi Gallery. The Turkish Sultan Abdul Aziz awarded him the “Osmaniye” order, which Aivazovsky later – in 1894 returned to him, together with other Turkish medals, through the Turkish consul in Feodosia, because of the Armenian massacres. Broken to the bottom of his soul by the genocide of his people, he also sends a message to the Sultan to “throw his orders and medals into the sea”. Aivazovsky painted several paintings about these tragic events. One of them is the “Massacre of Armenians near Trabazon”.
In 1880, Aivazovsky opened a gallery in his home. At the time, it was the third in Russia, after the Hermitage and the Tretyakov Gallery. The artist continues to travel around the world, on invitations to exhibitions in Italy, France, Great Britain. He celebrated his 50-year creative activity with an exhibition in London.
Two years before he died, a famous meeting took place between Aivazovsky and another great Russian genius – Chekhov. How the great master of the pen described the great master of the brush, in one letter: “In him are combined a general, a priest, an artist, an Armenian, a local old peasant and Othello”. Indeed, an extremely accurate description for such a multifaceted personality as Aivazovsky. In the last years of his life, the artist opened an art school in Feodosia, provided water for the city from his own estate, built a historical museum, made the construction of a commercial port and a connection with the railway network of the country.
Of the nearly 6,000 paintings painted by Aivazovsky, most of them are related to the sea. It is curious that he painted his seascapes from memory and far from the shore. His ability to convey the movement of sea waves without observing them closely is astounding. Moreover, Aivazovsky, in his more mature period, painted his seascapes on large-scale canvases, on which the effect is even more spectacular. With his second wife, Aivazovsky took a trip to America – to New York and Washington. He painted Niagara Falls.
He is admired by the best artists in the world. Ivan Aivazovsky died on May 2, 1900. His dying wish was to be buried in the yard of an Armenian church. His sarcophagus, made of white marble, was designed by the great Italian sculptor Bioggioli.
Photo: Aivazovsky’s grave
