Iwan Aiwasowski

In 1842, in Rome, a 25-year-old Ivan Aivazovsky had a picture of Naples Bay by moonlight on show that stopped the English painter J.M.W. Turner, then the most celebrated marine painter in Europe, in front of it. Turner wrote him a short poem in Italian praising the picture's light. That same year Pope Gregory XVI bought one of Aivazovsky's seascapes, Chaos, for the Vatican's own gallery. Aivazovsky, born to Armenian parents in the Crimean port of Feodosia, had graduated two years early from the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg with a gold medal and had been sent to Italy to study on the Academy's money.

He worked in an unusual way for a painter of storms and coastlines: almost entirely from memory, rarely sketching a scene on site, and fast, sometimes finishing a large canvas in a single sitting of a few hours. In 1845 he returned to Feodosia for good, built a house and studio overlooking the sea he had spent his whole youth leaving to study, and stayed there for the rest of his career, appointed official painter of the Russian navy and painting its ships and battles alongside pure seascapes.

Over roughly 60 years he produced about 6,000 paintings, and used his wealth on Feodosia itself, funding the town's first public museum, a school of art and a new aqueduct that brought fresh water to a place that had gone without it. The writer Anton Chekhov popularised a local saying about anything especially beautiful: that it was "worthy of Aivazovsky's brush."