Thread by @culturaltutor

If you like paintings of the ocean then you'll love Ivan Aivazovsky — he was the most famous seascape artist of the 19th century.

What made him so good? Aivazovsky realised that the key to painting the sea wasn't the waves...

Ivan Aivazovsky was born in 1817 to an impoverished family of merchants.

His birthplace and home was Theodosia, a town on the Black Sea in Crimea.

The family house overlooked the port; this is where a young Aivazovsky first fell in love with the sea.

Theodosia was a thriving, historic, multicultural port filled with traders and migrants and soldiers travelling from far away.

Thus the sea cast a lifelong spell over Aivazovsky, both for its natural beauty and because it was a romantic symbol of adventure, history, and culture.

As a boy he used charcoal to draw on the walls of the family home. His talent was noticed by a friend of his father, an architect, who gave Aivazovsky lessons in painting.

They moved to a town called Simferopol, where Aivazovsky's precocious skills impressed the governor.

And the governor, with his connections to the establishment and nobility of the Russian Empire, helped send Aivazovsky to the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg.

There he studied with the French maritime artist Philippe Tanneur, who painted things like this:

It was a meteoric rise for Aivazovsky, who won prizes as a student and graduated early.

In 1840 the Academy sent him to study in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London, Venice, and Rome.

It was in Rome that he met JMW Turner, the aging English master of Romantic art:

In Rome Pope Gregory XVI bought a painting by Aivazovsky called Chaos, which depicts God dividing the waters.

But the Pope would be only one of the many influential patrons who supported Aivazovsky as he surely but not-so-slowly became Europe's greatest maritime painter.

Upon returning to Russia he was appointed as the official artist of the Imperial Navy. Thus he could indulge his oldest passion — the ocean — by travelling with and painting the fleet.

And experiencing the sea and the navy up close only made him an even better painter.

He also loved — and was commissioned — to paint historical scenes of naval battles, whether defeats or victories or disasters.

These were among his best work: dramatic, chaotic, and frightening, filled with flames and smoke.

A terrifying vision of naval warfare.

Soon enough Aivazovsky fell in with the Russian cultural elite, even travelling alongside the Imperial Family.

In 1845 he went with them to Constantinople, where his passions for the sea, travel, and history were all united.

Atmospheric, sumptuous, emotional, magical.

Aivazovsky's paintings were popular and critically acclaimed all around Europe. He exhibited them, won prizes, and received official honours as far afield as France, the Ottoman Empire, and Greece.

Little wonder...

When Aivazovsky returned to Theodosia the impoverished boy wonder had come back an international superstar.

And Aivazovsky gave back to the town and people of his birthplace: he built a large estate, held exhibitions, opened an art school, and even brought the Empress to visit.

What made Aivazovsky so successful? Well, his paintings speak for themselves — they are thrilling, dramatic, mysterious, and beautiful.

Because, even though he was part of the international network of "Academic" European artists, Aivazovsky forever remained a Romantic at heart.

Aivazovsky's paintings are more than realistic; the scenes he painted didn't "actually" look like that.

But this was his greatest skill — to draw out what was essential and mould everything else to that.

He *understood* the sea and so he painted it better than anybody.

And therein lies the key to Aivazovsky's seascapes.

He realised that the full power, beauty, and scale of the sea was best brought out not by the waves themselves so much as what surrounded them.

And, above all, by light — on, in, around, through, reflected, refracted by water.

There was a tendency with the maritime painters of European Academies to paint the sea in a sculptural way, such that the waves looked stiff and frozen.

But Aivazovsky gave them life — we sense the waves flowing and crashing, or even just lapping the shore.

Whereas the Academies favouried highly precise and smooth finishes, Aivazovsky's technique slowly became *less* precise.

The key that unlocked the secret to painting the eternal movement of the oceans.

Compare two of his paintings, 40 years apart, to see the difference.

Alas, there was a growing feeling in Russia that their culture was becoming too westernised.

Thus Aivazovsky, whose reputation in Western Europe exceeded that of all other artists from the Russian Empire, came to be seen as an old-fashioned outsider.

Still, he kept painting...

For he was a prolific artist who worked all the time and worked at pace — Aivazovsky made over five thousand paintings in his lifetime.

They weren't all of the sea: there were portraits, group portraits, historical scenes, Biblical scenes, and landscapes.

But it was when painting the sea that Aivazovsky's talent and skill shone most brightly — and that helped him remain a succesful and popular artist until the end of his life.

He went to the Chicago World Fair in 1892, at the age of 75, where his paintings were exhibited.

Aivazovsky did not stop painting the sea until the end of his long and successful life, nor did he ever stop receiving awards and recognition, and nor did he ever stop giving back to his beloved Theodosia, where he died in 1900.

A rare, happy story among artists?

That is, in brief, the story of Ivan Aivazovsky, regarded during his lifetime and ever since as one of the greatest ever painters of the sea — if not the greatest.

Why? Above all because he worshipped the sea, and in his art we can share that enduring love, fear, and awe...