By Ana-Teodora Kurkina MA & PhD in History Ana is a social historian who holds a PhD in history from LMU Munich and UR Regensburg. She earned her second MA from Central European University, Budapest and her first MA from MSU, Moscow. When she is not writing about art and propaganda, she plays strategic boardgames. Her professional interests revolve around Eastern Europe.
Ivan Aivazovsky: Master of Marine Art
Artists often have favorite subjects to which they return time and again. Ivan Aivazovsky painted the sea, inspiring a whole generation of European Romantic artists.
Apr 25, 2021 • By Ana-Teodora Kurkina , MA & PhD in History
Ivan Aivazovsky painted water as no one else did, his waves reflecting light and capturing the softest glimmers of stars with their foam-capped peaks. His uncanny ability to detect the smallest changes of seas earned him the title of Master of the Marine Art and created a plethora of legends that surround his name up to this day. One such legend suggests that he bought the oils from William Turner himself, which explains the luminescent nature of his colors. Aivazovsky and Turner were indeed friends, but neither used magical pigments in their works.
Ivan Aivazovsky: The Boy And The Sea
Ivan Aivazovsky’s life could inspire a movie. Armenian by descent, he was born in Feodosia, a town on the Crimean peninsula located in the Russian Empire . Exposed to diversity from his earliest childhood and born Ovanes Aivazyan, Aivazovsky would grow into a talented, multilingual artist and learned man whose paintings would be admired by many, including the Russian Tsar, the Ottoman Sultan, and the Pope. But his early life was far from easy.
As a child from a poor family of an Armenian merchant, Aivazovsky could never get enough paper or pencils. Unable to resist the urge to paint, he would draw the silhouettes of ships and sailors on whitewashed walls and fences. Once, while the future painter was vandalizing a recently painted façade, an unexpected stranger stopped to admire the sharp outlines of one of his soldiers, whose proportions were perfectly preserved despite the sloppiness of his technique. That man was Yakov Koch, a prominent local architect. Koch immediately noticed the boy’s talent and gave him his first album and paints.
More importantly, the architect introduced the young prodigy to the mayor of Feodosia, who agreed to allow the Armenian boy to attend the classes with his children. When the mayor became the head of the Taurida Region (guberniya), he brought the young painter along with him. It was there, in Simferopol, that Aivazovsky would paint first of his 6000 paintings.
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Nowadays, everyone who has ever heard of Ivan Aivazovsky associates him with marine paintings. Little is known about his sketches and etchings, nor his landscapes and figures. However, Aivazovsky was as versatile as many other Romantic painters of the time. His interests revolved around historical plots, cityscapes, and people’s hidden emotions. The portrait of his second wife , for example, gives off the same vibes of mystery and profound beauty as his marine art. However, it was his love for water that accompanied him his entire life. After his acceptance to the Imperial Academy of Art in Saint Petersburg in 1833, Aivazovsky simply redirected that passion. After all, where else would one find such a combination of water and architecture as in the so-called Venice of the North?
Perhaps it was Aivazovsky’s homesickness that compelled him to return to the sea. Or perhaps it was the multitude of unforgettable colors he would see in a wave. Aivazovsky once said that it is impossible to paint all the greatness of the sea, to transmit all its beauty and all its menace when looking directly at it . This phrase recorded in his writings gave birth to an urban legend that remains prominent in popular Russian memory: Aivazovsky rarely ever saw the real sea. That, of course, is largely a myth. But like many myths, it does also contain a grain of truth.
At first, Aivazovsky painted his marine views mostly from memory. He could not spend all his time at the Baltic Sea in Saint Petersburg, nor could he always return home to Feodosia to see the Black sea. Instead, the artist relied on his stellar memory and imagination, which allowed him to replicate and recreate the tiniest of details of a landscape that he had only glimpsed at or heard about. In 1835, he even received a silver medal for his marine landscape, capturing the severe beauty of the damp and cold climate of the region. By that time, the artist had already become Ivan Aivazovsky, changing his name and falling under the spell of European Romanticism that was dominating the world art scene.
A Romantic Artist And His Marine Art
After receiving his first silver medal, Aivazovsky became one of the most promising young students at the Academy, crossing paths with the stars of Russian Romantic Art, such as the composer Glinka or the painter Brullov. An amateur musician himself, Aivazovsky played the violin for Glinka, who took a particular interest in the Tatar melodies that Aivazovsky had collected in his youth in Crimea. Allegedly, Glinka even borrowed some of the music for his internationally acclaimed opera Ruslan and Ludmila .
Although he enjoyed the rich cultural life of the imperial capital, the Master of Marine Art never intended to stay in Petersburg forever. He sought not only change but also new impressions, much like most Romantic artists of his time. Romantic art replaced the structured calmness of the previously popular Classicism movement with the turbulent beauty of motion and the volatile nature of humans and their world. Romantic art, like water, was never truly still. And what could be a more romantic topic than the unpredictable and mysterious sea?
Ivan Aivazovsky graduated two years early and was immediately sent on a mission unlike any other. All had to serve the Russian Empire in different ways, but rarely anyone received a commission like the one entrusted to Aivazovsky. His official task was to capture the landscapes of the East and represent the glory of the Russian Navy. As an official painter of the Navy, he painted the views of port cities, ships, and ship formations, befriending high-ranking officers and ordinary sailors alike. The whole fleet would start firing cannons just for Aivazovsky, so he could observe the smoke dissipating in the fog to paint his future works. Despite his military surroundings, war and imperial politics never interested the painter. The sea was the true and only hero of his paintings.
Like most Romantic artists, Aivazovsky depicted the fleeting movement and emotion of the ever-changing world rather than its structure and organization. Thus, Review of the Black Sea Fleet in 1849 does not focus on the tiny officers who are clustered in the corner of the sprawling masterpiece. Even the parading ships are secondary compared to the light and water that split into a myriad of colors, showing movement in an otherwise ordained scene.
In some ways, certain works of Ivan Aivazovsky’s marine art referenced Theodore Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa created two decades earlier. The Ninth Wave (a favorite of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I) reflects Aivazovsky’s fascination with the human drama of a shipwreck and the desperation of its survivors. The mighty sea is but a callous witness. Ivan Aivazovsky experienced this cruel nature of the sea first-hand, surviving several storms. Aivazovsky’s sea rages in battle but also contemplates when people stop to ponder on its shore.
In his Galata Tower by Moonlight , painted in 1845, the sea is dark and mysterious, just like the small figures gathering to watch the rays of moonlight on the shimmering water. His depiction of the Battle of Cesme ten years later leaves the sea burning with the wrecked and thrashed ships in the center of the picture. On the other hand, his Bay of Naples is as serenely peaceful as the couple who watches the waters.
Expected Outcomes
- How to paint a realistic ocean wave and surf with pastels.
- How to apply an underpainting wash over the dry pastels to create a base layer of color to the shapes of the waves.
- Learn to identify the parts of a wave and the color values in the wave.
- A student will have a better understanding of the steps for layering color.
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A ship on destiny’s seas
But he that hath the steerage of my course
Direct my sail.Romeo and Juliet, Act 1 Scene 4
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Romeo says this in Act 1, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet, just before he and his friends Benvolio and Mercutio sneak into the Capulet party. Having stated that his “soul of lead” pins him immovably to the ground, and then that “Under love’s heavy burden do I sink”, he shifts from a stubborn landlocked perception of his lovelorn state to a maritime metaphor: his life as a ship on Destiny’s seas, paralleling human ontology to the natural environment as his friends unconsciously lure him to the event that begins his end.
Who is the ‘he’ that steers his course? Is this figure God, or Fate? Is Romeo making a sarcastic analogy between these entities and one or the other of his friends forcing him to go to the party, or is it simply himself? Depending on how you stage it, any of these can be true, allowing for vast interpretive liberty. When you consider the element of fate in Romeo and Juliet, a play pre-scripted by its own prologue, Romeo’s submission to its power becomes significant; by conceding himself to be a human vessel on the waters of life, his metaphor of steering is an unknowing truism of the all-encompassing fate that governs the play; an unconscious, quiet but powerful yielding to the love and death that reconciles the two families.
In the end, Romeo does sink under love’s heavy burden, but one might argue that his ship is destined to fail — the ‘course’ that it has charted for him is not one with a happy ending.
Annabelle Higgins is a 17-year-old writer, director, performer and young scholar who hosts the podcast A Teenager’s Take on Shakespeare.
The sea as a conceptual space
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end.Sonnet 60
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The opening lines of Sonnet 60 present Shakespeare’s sea as a conceptual space, rather than a geographical one – likening the waves relentlessly making towards the shore to the fleetingness of human lifetimes, thus blurring together spatiality and temporality, and establishing a parallel between maritime imagery and death.
The sea and the land meet in rich metaphorical spaces, foregrounding transience and liminality. These images invite readers to contend with the discomfort of the indefinable, through exploring the everchanging spatiality of the ocean – the shore is the terminus of the sea, but still inextricably connected to it, just as death is by necessity linked to life. The human dream of truly conquering the sea – though said conquest presents a constant, dangerous and ultimately impossible endeavour, rather than an accomplishable goal – is equated with the pseudo-immortality that Shakespeare’s speaker imagines might be granted to both him and his love through literary greatness.
Attempting to stop time might be as futile as trying to stop the sea from reaching the shore, but it is precisely through this struggle – through the exploration of boundaries, pushing of limits, and a desperate striving for the impossible, all stemming from the human unwillingness to accept inevitability – that great accomplishments are made possible, and new spaces are opened up.
Theodora Loos is a postgraduate English Literary and Cultural Studies student, focusing on maritime literature at the University of Regensburg, and currently studying abroad at Auckland University.
England as a maritime mercantile state
His mother was a votaress of my order:
And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip’d by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands,
Marking the embarked traders on the flood,
When we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
Following,—her womb then rich with my young squire,—
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
And for her sake do I rear up her boy,
And for her sake I will not part with him.A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2 Scene 1
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My favourite passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, infused with the sea, brings a reflective pause to the action, re-focussing our attention on the warmth of female friendship between Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, and her votaress. In place of competition and aggression, a nostalgic serenity is evoked through sensuous images taken from the simple pleasures of life: sitting on the sand, taking in the night air, breathing in the heady scent of spices, gossiping, laughing, and watching merchants setting off on their long sea voyages.
The state of pregnancy is described in a remarkable image of lightness: a sail, billowing, swelling, and brought to full capacity for life through the power of the amorous wind. Subtly underscoring the dreamy atmosphere is the use of sibilants that dot the passage: spiced, gossiped, side, sat, sands, sails, swimming, squire, trifles, sake.
The “But” signals the abrupt change in mood with a poignant reminder of the mortal perils of labour. The anaphora (the repeated phrase of the last two lines) brings the whole reverie to an end with an assertion: Titania will not give up the “young squire”, the physical reminder of the bond of friendship, the “riches” brought to “port”.
The extraordinary interpenetration of sea and land through image, metaphor, and internal rhyme (Marking – embarking) emphasizes England as a maritime mercantile state. Neptune rules the shores as well as the sea. The votaress not only deliberately imitates the sailing ship in her appearance but also in her actions: her “swimming” gait suggests gliding, smooth movements. The “trifles” she brings back to Titania are likened to the merchandise of traders returning from their hazardous sea travels. Hovering occluded in the background is Queen Elizabeth I, who encouraged – sometimes actively, sometimes surreptitiously – exploration and piracy in the pursuit of power and supremacy on the seas. The far-distant, exotic India was one of the great prizes that beckoned.
Professor Irene (Irena) R. Makaryk, Distinguished University Professor, University of Ottawa, Canada, is currently working on her next book project, Arts for Survival: Performative Strategies and the Search for the Lost Franklin Expedition.
