Bracing the Waves

Ivan Aivazovsky painted roughly six thousand seascapes, and the striking thing is how few of them were painted in front of the sea. He worked from memory in the studio, building waves from an internal catalogue assembled over decades of looking. Born in Feodosia to an Armenian family, he became official painter to the Russian Navy and travelled widely, but Crimea remained his base and he funded a school, a museum and an archaeological dig there. The Ninth Wave, with survivors clinging to a mast under an improbable dawn, is the picture everyone knows. His speciality was translucency: water lit from behind, foam catching light, the moment before a wave collapses. He could complete a canvas in hours and often did so in front of audiences. That fluency makes the weaker paintings formulaic, but at his best nobody has painted water better.