Self-portrait

By 1874 Ivan Aivazovsky was famous across Europe for one thing above all, the sea, its storms, its calms, its light. That year the Uffizi asked him for a self-portrait for its gallery of artists' faces, an honor that, among Russian painters, had gone before him only to Orest Kiprensky a half-century earlier. So the man who had built a career on water sat for a portrait with no water in it, in formal dark dress, turned calmly toward us. He was from Feodosia on the Crimean coast, had grown up beside the Black Sea, and returned to it again and again in his work. Over his long life he painted himself perhaps ten times. This is the version he chose to send to Florence, to hang among the self-portraits the gallery had been collecting for centuries.