The Black Sea

The Black Sea, also known as A Storm Breaks on the Black Sea, is an oil-on-canvas seascape painted by Ivan Aivazovsky in 1881; it measures 149 × 208 cm and belongs to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow (inventory number 803).

Aivazovsky was born in Feodosia on the Crimean coast of the Black Sea, built his house there and spent most of his long life looking at that water; the sea he had watched since childhood was the main subject of his work. Pavel Tretyakov, founder of the gallery, was wary of the painter's output, believing that he repeated himself to please an eager public, and bought relatively few of his works. This canvas was an exception: Tretyakov acquired it from the artist in the year it was finished. In 1882 it was shown at Aivazovsky's solo exhibition at the Academy of Arts under the longer title about a storm beginning on the Black Sea, a name the painter himself was reportedly not happy with.

The composition is unusually plain for Aivazovsky. There is no shipwreck, battle or burst of sunlight; the horizon runs straight across the middle of the canvas, dividing a heavy, overcast sky from a dark sea whose waves grow and gather foam as they roll towards the lower edge. Greens, silvery greys and emerald tones deepen to an almost black blue at the horizon, where a lone sail is barely visible. Ivan Kramskoi, a realist who had often been critical of Aivazovsky, changed his view in front of this picture and described it as one of the grandest paintings he knew. Later writers have ranked it among the painter's finest marine works, and it was shown alongside The Ninth Wave and Rainbow in the Tretyakov Gallery's Aivazovsky exhibition of 2016.