Broad landscape with settlers

The Crimean War ended at the treaty table in Paris in March 1856. Aivazovsky had spent part of it inside besieged Sevastopol, where he put on an exhibition of his sea pieces for the officers, and he had painted the Russian fleet for most of his working life. This canvas from that year turns away from the water altogether. It is the steppe around Izium, flat to the horizon, with carts crossing it. The travellers are usually identified as chumaks, the ox-cart carriers who hauled salt and dried fish up from the Crimean coast and brought grain back down, a trade with its own roads and camping places that the new railways of southern Ukraine finished off within a generation. Aivazovsky produced several thousand pictures and most of them are of the sea. This one is in private hands.