Russian Lacquered Box - After Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900) Maritime Painting. Depicts a darkening sky over rough waves with a sail ship in the distance on the right and mountainous terrain over the beach on the left. Originally painted in 1859, titled "Breakwater." Absolutely stunning copy of the detail in the water. Nice red interior. Signed indistinctively bottom left of the top hinged cover. Sea Scape (Crimea). Fedoskino school, after Aivazovsky. 

Condition: Commensurate with age. 

Size: 3 1/2 x 4 x 1 1/2 In.

8# #6033 .

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky was born in 1817 into an Armenian family in the Black Sea port town of Feodosia in Crimea. Following his education at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, Aivazovsky traveled throughout Western Europe and lived briefly in Italy in the early 1840s. In one year alone he was honored with a solo show in Vienna, presented a gold medal by Pope Gregory XVI, and was the only representative from Russia at an international exhibition in the Louvre in Paris. He returned to Russia after deciding to focus on maritime art and settled back in Feodosia, where he spent most of the rest of his life. He married a woman named Julia Grave in 1848, with whom he had four children. They separated in 1860 and divorced in 1877 with permission from the Armenian Church, since Graves was a Lutheran. Aivazovsky was made an academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts, and was appointed the “official artist of the Russian Navy to paint seascapes, coastal scenes, and naval battles.” His family had close ties with the military and political elite of the Russian Empire, and had often attended military maneuvers since he was a youth. He was sponsored by the state and was well-regarded and extremely successful as a painter during his lifetime. The saying “worthy of Aivazovsky’s brush” popularized by Anton Chekhov in his dramatic writing became a popular phrase in Russia for describing something lovely. He held numerous solo exhibitions in Russia, Europe, and eventually in the United States. However, from the 1860s on he isolated himself from the outside world, keeping a small circle of friends and relatives, and by that time Russian art was moving from Romanticism towards a distinct Russian style of Realism, while Aivazovsky continued to paint Romantic seascapes and attracted heavy criticism. Aivazovsky’s second wife, Anna Burnazian, was a young Armenian widow 40 years his junior who he married in 1882. He was deeply affected by the Hamidian massacres of the Ottoman Empire between 1894 and 1896, and painted several important works depicting the plight of the Armenian people. Aivazovsky died on April 19th, 1900 in his home in Feodosia. During his almost 60 year career he created around 6,000 paintings, the vast majority of which were seascapes, but he often depicted battle scenes, portraiture, and was one of the first to incorporate Armenian themes and iconography into popular Russian art. Most of Aivazovsky’s works are found today in Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian, and Turkish museums, as well as private collections across the globe.

Commensurate with age.