Le Caucase vu de la mer

Aivazovsky was 77 when he painted this in 1894, and he had spent his whole life beside the Black Sea in Feodosia, in Crimea, where he was born to an Armenian family. He rarely painted outdoors. Seascapes like this one he built from memory in the studio, working fast, trusting his eye for how light sits on moving water. Here the Caucasus mountains rise across the water, seen from the deck of a ship, the range that Russia had finished conquering only 30 years before after a long war in those mountains. The glow low on the horizon and the transparency of the nearer waves are the effects he chased his entire career, and painted more than 6,000 times.