Sudak

Aivazovsky painted this in 1898, when he was 81 and had about two years left to live. Sudak is a small town on the southern coast of Crimea, a short way along the shore from Feodosia, the port where he was born and where he spent almost his whole life. He had painted this coast since boyhood, and by the 1890s he had produced several thousand seascapes, more than almost any painter of the century. The place itself carries a lot of history. On the cape above Sudak still stands a Genoese fortress, raised by traders from Genoa between the 13th and 15th centuries, when this stretch of the Black Sea was a link on the routes between Europe and Asia. Even at 81 he was still signing and dating fresh canvases of the water he had known longest.