Giorno di sole

Aivazovsky painted the sea more or less his whole long life, from the same small Crimean town of Feodosia where he was born and where he built a gallery for his own work. This is a calm one, a sunlit day with the light broken up on the water, the kind of luminous sea-surface he was famous for and could paint largely from memory rather than from life. He worked fast and produced thousands of canvases over his career. By 1884 he was in his late sixties, long celebrated across Europe and Russia, and still returning to the same subject, the light coming off the sea by his home town.