Shipwreck

Aivazovsky painted the sea and almost nothing else, and by 1876 he had been at it for decades from the same place, Feodosia, his hometown on the Crimean coast of the Black Sea. He was attached to the Russian navy and had watched real storms and sea battles, yet he did not paint in front of the water. He worked from memory, and fast, often finishing a canvas in a single session, sure that something as restless as a wave could never be copied from life while you stared at it. Shipwrecks were a subject he came back to again and again, the survivors usually tiny against a sea that seems lit from within. He left some six thousand paintings, most of them water. The studio he built at Feodosia had windows that looked onto the courtyard, not the sea.