Aivazovsky’s Water

The 1874 self-portrait is almost dry land. A dark coat, a blue ground, a look that knows it is being looked at. There is no water in the picture, which is the joke and the clue. Ian Chilvers, in the Oxford Dictionary of Art, calls him a Russian painter who spent most of his life in the Crimean seaport of Theodosia — now Feodosiya — and whose huge output, “said to have painted more than 6,000 pictures,” was devoted to marine subjects. The face is a man who has already chosen his subject. The work is what happens when that subject will not stay still.

He was born there on 17 July 1817, 29 July New Style, and he died there on 19 April 1900, 2 May New Style. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine records the baptismal name Hovhannes Aivazian, and a family of Galician Armenians settled in Crimea. He studied in Simferopol, then at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg from 1833 to 1837. In the early 1840s he travelled through Italy, France, England, the Netherlands, and the Ottoman Empire. In 1845 he became an academician and settled again in Feodosiya. The dates are a map of a man who learned the capital’s craft and then went home to the water that had already taught him. Chilvers adds western Europe and the United States, dozens of one-man exhibitions, honours from foreign academies. Popularity is not the same as thinness. It is what happens when a difficult thing — moving water — is made legible without being tamed.

The Ninth Wave is the picture people mean when they say his name without meaning to. It hangs in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg: oil on canvas, 221 by 332 centimetres, painted in 1850. The museum’s catalogue notes that it was originally acquired for the Imperial Hermitage and entered the new museum in 1897. Dawn, or something like dawn, burns through cloud. A green-dark sea lifts. On a broken mast a few figures cling, one arm raised as if the light itself could be hailed. The Russian Museum, in a later handbook, explains the title as popular legend: the ninth wave is the most terrible, the most powerful, the one that finishes a wreck. Then the same paragraph refuses to let the legend be only doom. Night is breaking. The mast, at dawn, seems a more reliable refuge than it did in the dark. That is the museum speaking. The canvas does not caption itself. It only puts human scale against a water that does not care about scale.

The Ninth Wave

Look at the light before you look at the men. The storm is not grey. It is amber, rose, a yellow that has no business in a disaster and therefore feels like one. Chilvers speaks of a highly charged Romantic style, “notably in his storm scenes and mysterious moonlit views.” Romantic, here, is not a costume. It is a decision about where the feeling lives. It lives in the water’s body, in the way foam can be drawn as if it had a pulse, in a sky that behaves like a second sea. The figures on the mast are not a novel. They are a measure. Without them the wave would still be beautiful. With them, beauty has a cost you can count on your fingers.

Rainbow, 1873, in the Tretyakov, is the same weather after it has changed its mind. A boat, still small. Water still rough. The sky still heavy. Across it, a pale arc, almost shy, as if colour were an afterthought the storm had not approved. If The Ninth Wave is catastrophe lit like a chapel, Rainbow is the minute in which catastrophe becomes weather again. Aivazovsky’s storms are famous enough to be printed on tins. The quieter trick is this: he can let a marine end without a moral. The rainbow is not a sermon. It is optics over a boat that has not yet reached shore. You are asked to stand in the leftover rain and notice that the sea has more than one temperature.

Chilvers lists naval battles among the repertoire, with ports, rocky shores, icebergs, paddle steamers, “virtually every conceivable kind of subject concerned with the sea or waterways.” The Battle of Chesme at Night is history painted as combustion on water. The action is 1770; the picture is later imagination, not a dispatch from the deck. Flame turns the sea into a second fire. Moonlight, where it survives, looks almost tactless. These canvases are easy to misread as patriotism in oil. They are also studies in how light behaves when it is not the sun: how a ship can become a lantern, how smoke can be a weather of its own. The battle is the excuse. The subject is still water, now forced to carry burning wood.

The harbour pictures are the other half of the same mind. The Harbor at Odessa on the Black Sea, 1852, is ships at rest under a sky that has room to breathe. Masts, a quay, the ordinary business of a port. After the wrecks, this calm can look like a different painter. It is not. A marine painter who cannot do a harbour has only one sentence. Aivazovsky’s sentence includes the day when the sea is a road. Odessa, on this canvas, is not a guidebook. It is a width of water made social: commerce, waiting, the low drama of arrival. He had been back in Feodosiya since 1845. The Black Sea towns were not exotic to him. They were the furniture of a life spent looking from the shore and then inventing, in the studio, what the shore had not held still long enough to copy.

Sebastopol, also 1852, widens the same grammar. A bay, a weather of cloud, ships as small facts against a coastline. Two harbours in one year is not a travelogue. It is a man testing how much sky a port can carry before it becomes a seascape with buildings. Sevastopol, in later Russian memory, would mean a siege. This canvas does not know that yet, or does not say it. It offers a roads, a fleet at ease, the particular grey of a southern sea that is not trying to drown anyone today. To look at it after The Ninth Wave is to see that survival, in Aivazovsky, is sometimes just a harbour that holds.

The Black Sea, 1881, in the Tretyakov, is almost nothing. Water, a low sky, a tiny ship. No wreck. No rainbow. No town. The wave is the whole plot. Later viewers sometimes prefer this picture to the famous sunrise of 1850 because it refuses the theatre of survival. The theatre, though, was never cheap. What has changed is the ratio. Human presence shrinks to a mark on the horizon. The sea is allowed to be the sea: a body with a mood, heaving as if it had lungs. If you have only one Aivazovsky in your head, let it be The Ninth Wave. If you have two, add this. Together they show the range inside a single obsession. One canvas puts men against water. The other lets water win the argument without raising its voice.

The Black Sea

The Black Sea at Night, 1879, is Chilvers’s “mysterious moonlit views” made literal. Pale light on dark water. A sky that keeps its secrets. Moonlight, in these pictures, is not decoration. It is a second kind of day, colder, more private, in which the sea looks as if it were thinking. Storms shout. Night whispers, and the whisper is harder to paraphrase. A visitor who knows only the orange wreck has not heard this register. The same painter who can set a mast on fire with sunrise can also leave you alone with a moon and a swell. That loneliness is not emptiness. It is attention without an anecdote.

The Wave, 1889, in the Russian Museum, closes the distance the 1881 Black Sea still kept. The water comes at you. Foam, a wall, wreckage if you look for it, but the first sensation is scale: a single movement so large that the frame can barely hold the crest. Late Aivazovsky does not retire from drama. He subtracts the sunrise and leaves the body of the sea. The Romantic charge Chilvers named is still there. It has simply moved from sky to water, from allegory to physics that still feels like feeling. You do not need a legend about a ninth wave. The wave is enough.

Among the Waves, 1898, belongs to the gallery he made in Feodosiya. Green-grey water, foam, almost no sky, no shore, no ship you can trust as a story. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine notes that in 1880 he established an artists’ studio and picture gallery in the town, later donated to the city; the Aivazovsky Picture Gallery still holds hundreds of his works. A man who paints the sea for six decades and then, near the end, paints water without a harbour, without a wreck, without a moon to narrate it, is not repeating a trick. He is testing how little of the world the sea needs in order to be the world. The title is exact. Not before the waves, not after. Among.

Among the Waves

Six thousand pictures, if the old count is even roughly right, is a lifetime of returning to the same problem. Some will be timid. Chilvers does not pretend otherwise by calling the output huge. The best of them are not a formula. They are a way of looking until water becomes a character. He organised exhibitions at home and abroad. He was honoured, collected, copied. The copies are a nuisance for dealers and a compliment of a kind: the sea, once seen through him, is hard to unsee. What remains, for a visitor who is not counting catalogues, is simpler. A Crimean port. An Armenian family. An academy in the north. Then decades of looking at a moving surface until it could be painted as if memory were a kind of tide.

The Encyclopedia of Ukraine adds the honours that sit around that looking: academician in 1845, honorary member of the St Petersburg Academy in 1887, membership in other academies, a place in the Society of South Russian Artists. He showed in Odesa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv. The list is a map of a reputation that did not stay in the capital. It also records that the marine painter painted land. Ukrainian oxcarts in winter, harvest, chumaks, a windmill on a riverbank, moonlight on the Dnieper: the same eye, a different floor. Those canvases matter because they keep him from becoming a specialist in one trick. The sea is the centre. It is not the prison. A man who can paint a steppe sunset and a wreck at dawn is working in weather, not in a genre stall.

In 1880, the same source says, he established an artists’ studio and picture gallery in Feodosiya and later gave it to the city. The gallery still holds hundreds of his works, with other Crimean seascapes beside them. A gift of that kind is easy to read as civic virtue. It is also a practical sentence: this is where the pictures should be seen, in the town that taught the eye. Chilvers notes that the best collection of his paintings is in the museum named after him there. To look at Among the Waves in that company is different from meeting The Ninth Wave in St Petersburg. One is the legend the empire kept. The other is the late water he kept for home. Both are Aivazovsky. The visitor who wants only the sunrise wreck has chosen the postcard. The visitor who wants the man should make room for the gallery’s quieter green.

Travel, in Chilvers’s compact life, is not a holiday list. Western Europe, the United States, dozens of one-man exhibitions, foreign academies: a marine painter who could move a show the way a ship moves a cargo. Popularity at home and abroad is the fact under the later sniffing that Romantic seas were old-fashioned. They were fashionable because they worked. A storm that can be read across a language barrier is a kind of translation. So is a moon path on black water. The risk of that success is repetition. Six thousand pictures will include the timid ones. The cure is not to deny the number. It is to look at the few in which the water still startles: the 1850 wreck, the 1881 emptiness, the 1898 among. Fashion made him famous. Attention is what keeps a handful alive.

The craft, across those decades, is light on a moving body. Sunrise that behaves like fire. Moonlight that behaves like a private day. A harbour sky that behaves like rest. Foam drawn as if it had a pulse. Chilvers’s “highly charged Romantic style” is a critic’s coat. Under it is a simpler habit: he will not let water be a backdrop for a story that could have happened on land. Even Chesme’s burning ships are the sea forced to carry flame. Even Odessa’s masts are the sea forced to be a street. Once you have seen that, later Russian painting’s other waters — a Volga at Plyos, a lake over which a wooden church is tiny — feel like cousins, not copies. Aivazovsky does not own every Russian wave. He taught the culture that a wave could be the subject, not the scenery.

Begin with The Ninth Wave if you want the shock that made a reputation: light, wreck, the human measure. Stay for The Black Sea if you want the same painter without the legend. End with Among the Waves if you want to know what he kept when the anecdotes had been used up. The harbours — Odessa, Sevastopol — are the days in between, when the sea was a workplace. The night pictures are the other silence. He is not a guide to Crimea as a political argument. He is a way into a culture that has always lived beside water and needed someone to make the water look back. After him, a Russian seascape is never only a view. It is a weather you can stand in.