The story
Ivan Aivazovsky spent his life painting the sea and rarely left the town where he was born. In Feodosia, on the Black Sea coast of Crimea, he built a grand house with a picture gallery attached and, in 1880, opened its doors so the public could see his work. It was among the first galleries an artist of the Russian empire ever founded in his own name.
Aivazovsky was extraordinarily fast and prolific, turning out something like 6,000 paintings, most of them water and light, storms breaking over foundering ships and calm dawns over the harbour he could see from his windows. The gallery he left holds the largest collection of that work, several hundred canvases.
He is buried in the courtyard of an Armenian church nearby, under a stone that records, in Armenian, that he was an artist who brought his people fame. The town has kept his name on the gallery ever since.
