The survivors

By 1895 Aivazovsky was 78, in his last decade, and had been painting the sea for more than 60 years. He worked in his studio in Feodosia on the Crimean coast, almost never in front of the water. He believed a wave in motion could not be copied from life, so he carried the sea in his memory and painted it quickly, laying in the light first. Shipwreck was a subject he came back to across his whole career. Here the worst of the storm has passed and a handful of survivors cling to what is left of their vessel on a still-heavy swell. He had treated the same subject years earlier, in a separate canvas of 1878, and took it up again now, near the end. He would keep painting almost daily until his death in 1900, at 82.