怒海

By 1886 Ivan Aivazovsky had been painting the sea for close to 50 years, and almost none of it from the deck of a ship. He worked from memory in his studio in Feodosia, on the Crimean coast, turning out storms and calms by the thousand for the Russian navy that had made him its official painter. This one is all weather. Lightning breaks behind heavy cloud, the waves climb a dark line of rocks, and the light that does get through catches only the foam. Down in the left corner sits the reason to keep looking: a small boat of people, one of them pointing toward the shore while the others pull at the oars.