A. S. Pushkin at the Black Sea coast

Ivan Aivazovsky's A.S. Pushkin at the Black Sea Coast (1887) is an unusual subject for an artist famous above all for seascapes — a double tribute to the great Russian poet and to the Black Sea itself, which Pushkin celebrated in his Southern Exile poems. Pushkin's exile in the Crimea and Odessa in the early 1820s had given him an intimate relationship with the sea that became one of the defining inspirations of Russian Romanticism, and Aivazovsky — who had known Pushkin personally before the poet's death in 1837 — memorialized this relationship in paint. The Black Sea provided the setting that connected both men's deepest creative impulses.

Aivazovsky integrates the standing figure of Pushkin into a dramatic Black Sea setting with characteristic mastery of sea and sky — the waves and their light rendered with his extraordinary technical facility. The poet's silhouette against the luminous marine backdrop gives the composition a Romantic grandeur appropriate to the double subject of genius and elemental nature.