Rainbow

Rainbow is an oil-on-canvas seascape painted by Ivan Aivazovsky in 1873, measuring 102 × 132 cm and held by the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

By the early 1870s Aivazovsky had been painting the sea for decades, and some critics had begun to say that his improvisational way of working was out of date and that his gift was running dry. Rainbow is usually read as his reply. At first sight it is one of his many shipwreck scenes, but it marked a new stage in his career, chiefly in its colour: in place of the saturated, brilliant hues of earlier storms he used restrained, finely graded tones, and for all its romantic drama the picture leans noticeably towards realism. Writers on the painting describe its colour scheme as something new in Russian painting of the 1870s. Pavel Tretyakov, who bought only a small number of Aivazovsky's works for his collection, acquired this one, and the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky is recorded among those who admired it.

The scene is a gale off a rocky coast. Spray and drizzle blur the cliffs and the outline of a listing ship; since its masts stand and its sails are still set, commentators suggest it may have struck a reef rather than been dismasted by the storm. In the foreground a crowded lifeboat, its thirteen occupants rowing, clinging to the sides or crouching low, is driven towards the rocks while the helmsman points the way and one man waves his hat. Over the water, sunlight breaking through the cloud forms a barely visible rainbow, a sign of hope that the storm will end and the men will be saved. The tension of the foreground gives way towards the background to lighter blues, greens, violets and pinks. The painting was among the works shown with The Ninth Wave and The Black Sea in the Tretyakov Gallery's Aivazovsky exhibition of 2016.