Das Meer

Aivazovsky painted the sea and almost nothing else, and he did it from memory. Rather than set an easel on the shore, he worked in his studio in Feodosia, the Crimean port on the Black Sea where he was born and built a house right by the water, carrying the movement of waves and light in his head and laying it down quickly. By 1864 he was well established as the official painter to the Russian navy, which took him on fleet voyages and gave him plenty of open water to remember. Works like this one stayed close to home: he left his house and a gallery of his paintings to Feodosia, and hundreds of them still hang there today.