Nuit sur l'île de Rhodes

Aivazovsky sailed through the Aegean in 1845, stopping among the Greek islands, and this night scene at Rhodes came five years later, in 1850, worked up in the studio from memory. He was the great marine painter of nineteenth-century Russia, and what he chased above all was light. Here it is moonlight, laid over the water in thin glazed layers so the sea seems lit from within while the harbour and shipping sit in shadow. He rarely painted in front of the sea itself. He preferred to store up the effects of a place and rebuild them later, sometimes finishing a canvas like this in a single sitting.