Aivazovsky gallery in Feodosia

Ivan Aivazovsky, Hovhannes Aivazian, was born in Feodosia in 1817 to an Armenian merchant's family and died there in 1900. Most of his paintings are the sea. The governor of Feodosia, Alexander Kaznacheyev, helped him into a school in Simferopol and then into the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. Pushkin saw his work at the Academy exhibition of 1836.

After the Academy he spent two summers painting in Crimea and sailed with a squadron off the Caucasian coast. Then came Italy and more than twenty paintings of the Bay of Naples. Alexander Ivanov wrote that nobody else painted water like this. Pope Gregory XVI bought Chaos for the Vatican. Turner responded to The Bay of Naples by Moonlight. Before he was thirty Aivazovsky became a professor of the Academy, but he went on living in Feodosia, where he opened a studio and a school. He said a wave had to be remembered, not copied from nature.

The gallery

He founded the gallery in Feodosia himself and left it to the town. It holds more than 400 of his paintings and sketches, and also works by Voloshin, Lagorio and Bogaevsky. Among the canvases is Among the Waves, painted late in his life. Crimea is temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation. For now it is not a place for tourism.