IT was near the close of one of the short, brilliant afternoons of the Northern winter, and after a week of persistent picture-staring, that I had almost accomplished the whole vast round of that doubly imperial palace of art, the Hermitage of St. Petersburg. The prolonged strain of attention had brought my faculties wellnigh to that stage of deadness to impressions familiar to all frequenters of art galleries, — my brain confused with a shimmer of the color and traits of all the schools, in whose masterpieces that Northern treasurehouse of painting is so marvelously opulent. I stood before the door of a single unexplored room. “ This apartment,” said my attendant commissionaire, “ is the gallery of our yet unformed Russian school, and contains scarcely anything worthy of attention.”

I entered, nevertheless, the small chamber facing the splendid plaza of the Winter Palace, and discovered a space dim with an air of neglect, and evidently unfrequented even by native visitors. It was obviously the corner of the vast palace unpenetrated by the pride of the authorities. The walls were mostly unhung with pictures, their gaping blanks decorated at best by about a score of canvases, — for the most part, indifferent historical pieces, interpolated here and there by yet more indifferent portraits of Russian sovereigns. An elaborate scene or two, marked with the name of Bogoluboff or Lossenko (the reputed founder of the Russian school, in 1757), appeared at first glance to exhaust the merits of the entire collection. It was not so, however. As I turned to the wall from which I had entered, where the light from the great square fell in a direct generous blaze, and again to the spaces on my right in the half shadow, Russia’s genius in color was revealed ! It was the hand and art of Ivan Aivazofsky, — the name then first seen by me as I glanced at the catalogue of the Imperial Collection in my hand. The numbers on four canvases of the largest size corresponded to the name of the painter on the list of the native school. Two were marine pieces, inspired by views of the Black Sea, and two were studies directly from the artist’s brain, their subjects marked respectively The Deluge and The Creation. There was in these pictures a quality that instantly summoned back to my fagged faculties their lapsed energies of admiration.

The art before me varied in its technical detail from none of the conventional rules, but both in inspiration and coloring it was differentiated from all the historic and Western schools. In it were force, vividness, intensity, to the highest limit, and these combined with a weird sombreness of treatment that recalled Doré and even Dante. The marine views, in their sweep and freedom of coloring, suggested the flowing, powerful brush of Turner, while the daring imaginativeness of the original scenes was akin to that of Ary Scheffer himself. But what separated these canvases from all comparisons, withdrawing them from every hint of the schools and art of the West, was their dominating imagination, which was neither Western nor European, but a veiled glow born evidently of the fire of the Orient and the genius of its struggling, mysterious races. The observer beheld, as if standing on the very shore, a vision of sunrise over the Euxine, — the low-lying Cimmerian darkness cloven with a rush of purple splendor out of the East, flooding down over sullen gray waves, cut like life and breaking into foam and spray against a violet coast; and again, a gleam of light rayed from the extremity of a funnel of blackness deep as eternity, — the sublime and audacious but simple conception of the Creation ! Such in tone and power were these paintings. Their motive was melancholy, — the motive, indeed, of all Russian art.

One peculiarity more, however, there appeared in the work of Aivazofsky, — and I know not whether it is to be judged a virtue or defect of his art, though an element common in literature : in studying his scenes the mind of the observer was drawn insistently back to the painter himself; recognizing instinctively in the art a subtle and powerful relationship to the personality of the artist. Piqued by a curiosity so awakened, as well as by a singular fascination of his work, I was not long in acquiring what was known of the painter in St. Petersburg.

Aivazofsky was not a resident of the capital; he was an unfamiliar personality even in Russia ; the available details of his life were then, as now, meagre. He was born in the Crimea, at Theodosia, on the shore of the Black Sea, in 1817. His family was not Russian, but Armenian, descended from the ancient family of Aïvaz. or Haïvaz, which prior to its settlement in the Crimea had been established for more than two hundred years in Galicia. The members of this family, however, with the tenacity of their Eastern race, had retained during the long exile all the instincts of their Asian origin.

Like his elder brother, Gabriel, who became a half century ago one of the foremost of Russian historians, Aivazofsky inherited genius. He was sent as a boy to be educated in St. Petersburg, where his precocious artistic talents drew the attention of the Czar Nicholas, by whose special order he was made, at the age of sixteen, a pensioner of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. Graduating a few years later, he traveled in Italy, and returned to Russia; making, in an almost incredibly brief time after, a “ tremendous reputation,” as it was called, by his landscapes, his genre pictures, and his sea sketches and naval battles. He easily took rank as the first of native marine painters, was elected professor in the Imperial Academy, his alma mater, and was decorated with the order of St. Anne of Russia.

As early as his twenty-fifth year Aivazofsky had become known also outside of Russia. Before that age, in fact, he had obtained his third medal from Continental societies. In 1848 he was elected to honorary membership in the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, and not many years later received the decoration of the Legion of Honor at Paris.

The general remoteness of his themes and the high imaginativeness of their treatment have been, no doubt, the conspiring elements which have kept the fame of Aivazofsky caviare to the public. His singular merit, however, has been for more than a quarter of a century thoroughly familiar to the circle of his profession in Europe. To borrow a phrase used of a kindred profession, he may be said in some sense to wear the enviable reputation of being a painter for painters. Dowered so generously with native gifts and inspired from a novel field of imagination, he has certainly achieved much with which to instruct his Western brethren in art. The works by which his talent is best known in Europe are those which have been sent from time to time to the exhibitions of the French Academy, where he is peculiarly distinguished. Among these are, A View on the Southern Shore of the Crimea, A Turkish Café at Rhodes, The Armenian Monks in Venice, Calm on the Mediterranean, The Island of Capri, A Pirate Bark attacked by a Russian Brig, and A View of Venice.

By some fatality of their selection, almost none of these pictures which have reached Western salons exhibit his art at its best, few of their subjects being those instinctive to his genius. Of the themes of his brush exposed in museums and private galleries throughout Russia, and in which his imagination has had freer play, the following are representative : Sunset on the Steppes, Fields of Wheat in Little Russia, Trebizond by Moonlight, A Storm at the Foot of Mt. Athos, Tempest on the Black Sea, Winter in Great Russia, The Steppes of New Russia, and various naval scenes from Russian history.

During my stay in St. Petersburg, I returned often to the Hermitage, to gather fresh impressions of the painter’s powerful studies in the Imperial Collection. I left the capital, however, with my curiosity unsatisfied about Aivazofsky. The mystery of his personality, persistently suggested by his art, was unsolved. Three months later I found myself on the shore of the Black Sea, looking from the frozen harbor of Odessa towards the warm lands of the South. Among my companions of travel over the lower steppes were two Russian architects in the imperial service, on their way to the Crimea, arrested here in Odessa, like myself, by the impassable Euxine. With the delicate courtesy of the noble Russian class, they came one evening to propose to an American stranger the pleasant relief of a visit in a resident family, whose friends they were. In half an hour we were entering the low doorway of a villa-like structure in a secluded street of the city. Our greeting, extended in perfect accent in whatever tongue we chose, whether Russian, English, German, French, or Italian, was from a household of beautiful women. The oldest of their number was a lady advanced in age, alert in faculties, with a noble figure and face, and carrying her nearly eighty years with the self-possession and ease of middle life. The next in years was our hostess, her daughter, a woman of fifty, whose pale face, dark hair and eyes, and exquisite air of high intelligence and noble breeding gave the impression of a most rare personality. Three others were her daughters, who in feature and manner copied the beauty and refinement of their mother.

The apartment into which we were welcomed corresponded to the grace of our entertainers. Along its sides were divans in the Oriental fashion ; dressed skins and soft Asian rugs were on the polished floor ; the walls were ornamented with objects of curious interest, relieved by engravings and occasional bits of color. There was nowhere anything of stiff conventional fineness, but over all an air of ease, softness, elegance, and art. We had entered the home of Ivan Aivazofsky ! Wooed by imperial favor and the flattery of aristocratic society in St. Petersburg, invited by his renown toward the art capitals of the West, the painter had refused the fascinations of fame, to establish his modest home here, by the remote verge of the Black Sea.

During my enforced sojourn in Odessa, Aivazofsky, as was usual with him, was absent in Armenia. Many renewals of my visit, however, in his charming and hospitable circle discovered the missing key to the painter’s personality which I had sought. Aivazofsky’s temperament is, as I then learned, the melancholy. He is not in love with the world nor with reputation, but with solitude, with his art, and more than all with nature in the regions of his birth and childhood. The tone and motif of his mind, like those of the genius of his race, are in the minor key. Moreover, the Asian strain in his lineage and blood has bound him with its link of fatal passion to the East. He is a representative artist of Russia, but of something added. The North for him is too remote and cold ; its skies are too monotonous, its plains too unrelieved to be always endured. His genius is sombre, but he is yet the son of the South and of sunny lands, shadowed though they are by awful mountains and washed by dark waters.

Aivazofsky’s life has been largely passed around the borders of that mysterious sea whose waves he so marvelously pictures. The mood of the Black Sea is his own. He is enamored of this sea as of another self. He has watched it in childhood, and appears never to tire of catching on his canvases its scenes of weird and splendid loveliness, infinitely varying under sun and storm, under twilight and morning. The whole circle of lands around these waters is the instinctive home of his imagination. Ararat, the Caucasus, and the Euxine are the trinity of natural elements that draw the worship of his genius ; and no trinity of nature could be more august.

Moving in these brilliant and quaintly classic regions and over this remote sea covered with the twilight of fable, Aivazofsky moodily forgets the world, and seldom returns even to the charmed circle in the quiet street in Odessa. Tiring of the too vivid contrasts and splendor of these scenes, he drops at intervals down through the gates of the Bosphorus and Hellespont into the mellower lights of the Ægean and the Levant. He pays the tribute of worshipful art under the snow-crowned altars of Samothrace, and halts at the feet of cloudy Athos to gather the impressions of tempest.

In the whole range of geography there is no realm more fascinating with weird and changeful scenes, with the solemn grandeur of waters and mountains, with august solitudes and historic memories, than that which Aivazofsky has elected as the central field of his art, — the coasts of the Black Sea. And in this romantic realm, endowed with a power to reproduce its sublimities, he is without a rival, — solitarily plucking its marvelous fruits of poetry.

In the broad field of art, Aivazofsky‘s place is in that modern triad of Russian genius, — voicing in color, as Turgenieff in literature and Glinka in melody, the genius of an emergent people, whose joy is in the minor and whose aspiration is a sob. But to the imagination of Muscovy, which in development is that of a quasi-barbarous, youthful stock, this painter adds through birth the instinct of a polished and ancient race, — the race of Armenia. His conditions would seem the ideal ones of an artist. To students of the West he should be at least known, and a master ; since, independently of his individual gifts, the novel inspiration of the Sclave which he represents is destined yet to play its powerful rôle in the education of the future.

William Jackson Armstrong.