The Black Sea

Aivazovsky was in his sixties by 1881, and he had already painted the sea thousands of times over. The full title tells you a storm is just beginning to rise. There is almost nothing in the picture but water and sky, ranks of grey-green waves rolling toward you under a heavy, brightening bank of cloud, with one small ship far off on the horizon. Aivazovsky grew up beside this sea at Feodosia, in the Crimea, and he did not paint it outdoors from the waves. He worked in his studio from memory, laying the water in over long sessions. The painter Ivan Kramskoi, a hard critic, thought it one of the grandest pictures he knew.