Shipwreck

The wave and the wreck here were painted from memory. When Aivazovsky made this in 1886 he was 69, official painter to the Russian navy, and he almost never worked in front of the sea. His studio in Feodosia, on the Crimean coast, looked onto a courtyard, not the water. He would fix a storm in his mind and then build it on the canvas fast, laying in the sky and the translucent crests from recall. That method is why his storms feel staged for maximum drama rather than observed on the spot, and it let him produce them in enormous numbers, around 6,000 paintings across sixty years. A wreck breaking up in heavy seas was one of the subjects he returned to most, the small dark hull left to the light coming through the water.