Ivan Aivazovsky painted this work in 1886, a year before the Imperial Academy of Arts honoured its perhaps most successful and prominent alumnus with a huge celebration to mark the fifty years since his graduation. By then, Aivazovsky had had a truly remarkable career. Born into a poor family of Armenian descent in the Crimean port town of Feodosia, over 2000 km from the capital Saint Petersburg, he had established himself as one of the preeminent seascape painters both in Russia and abroad.

Aivazovsky’s life spanned nearly the entire 19th century. He travelled extensively throughout Europe and visited Constantinople no less than eight t.mes s. He went to Egypt for the opening of the Suez Canal and would later even make the journey to America. In addition to his many exhibitions in Russia, starting with his first trip to Italy in 1840, he exhibited regularly abroad and was made honorary member of several European Academies. He was awarded orders in Russia and Turkey, and was the first ever Russian artist to receive the French Légion d’honneur.

The effect of light reflecting in the sea is one of the central motifs in Aivazovsky’s œuvre. While he excelled at painting the effects of the rising or setting sun on calm waters, it is his stormy seas, often including shipwrecks or survivors of disasters, that captured the imagination of his contemporaries and continue to be admired by collects ors today. Upon seeing one of Aivazovsky's storm pictures at an Academy exhibition, Fyodor Dostoevsky commented: ‘[…] here he is a master without rival, here he is a true artist. His storm has the same fascination, the same eternal beauty that strikes the spectator in a real-life storm.’¹

Although a mature work, The Wrath of the Seas is firmly rooted in the European Romantic tradition, of which Aivazovsky was the leading representative in Russia. Storms, shipwrecks and disasters at sea were particularly popular subjects among Romantic painters. Not only was it possible to express the beauty of nature, but also human vulnerability and the limits of progress when exposed to the forces of God’s creation, all ideas central to the Romantic movement. It is no coincidence that the aftermath of a shipwreck is the subject of one of the early landmarks of Romanticism, Théodore Géricault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19, Musée du Louvre, Paris; fig. 1). Aivazovsky’s work may be most closely compared with that of J. M. W. Turner, however. Not only did both artists share an interest in the same subject matter and the effects of light on the sea, but they also came to redefine the role and elevate the place of landscape painting, seascapes in particular, in their respective countries.

Comparisons between Turner and Aivazovsky were already made during the latter’s lifet.mes , and the two are said to have met, although this is not documented. They most likely never crossed paths, although they were in Venice at the same t.mes in 1840. Aivazovsky would however have seen works by his English colleague when he visited Britain in 1842. The present work is distinctly Turneresque, with a treatment of the background that blurs the distinction between water, sky and land. As in Turner’s Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (exhibited 1842, Tate, London; fig. 2) for example, the lifeboat in the present work is at the centre of the storm, exposed and completely surrounded by the elements.

¹ Quoted in Ivan Aivazovskii. K 200-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya, exh. cat., Moscow 2016, p. 30.