Parata della flotta del Mar Nero

Aivazovsky painted this in 1886, but the scene it shows belongs to 1849, a grand review of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, all sail and calm water and ships in perfect line. By the time he set it down, that world was gone. In the Crimean War of the 1850s the Russians had scuttled their own wooden fleet across the mouth of Sevastopol harbour to block the enemy, and the navy that rebuilt afterwards ran on steam and iron. So this is a portrait of a fleet remembered rather than seen, painted by a man who had stood at those reviews himself as the navy's official artist. The mist he pushes to the horizon does the quiet work of turning a real parade into something already half in the past.