La nona onda

Aivazovsky painted this in 1850, and the title comes from an old sailors' belief that waves arrive in sets and that the ninth one is the biggest and most deadly. So the moment he chose is the worst possible instant of a shipwreck, just as that killer wave is about to break. A handful of survivors cling to a broken mast in the middle of a huge sea, the night storm barely past. But look at the light. Aivazovsky floods the whole scene with a warm sunrise coming up behind the water, turning the spray gold and green rather than black, so the picture is terrifying and hopeful at the same time. The wreckage the men grip has drifted into the rough shape of a cross, and the dawn breaking through the clouds reads as a chance of rescue. He knew this sea in his body. He had grown up on the Black Sea coast in Feodosia and had once survived a serious storm at sea himself, and he painted almost everything from memory, working fast, without the water in front of him. This canvas quickly became his most famous, and generations in Russia took it as a picture of people refusing to go under.