Part II. There is something of the same emotional dynamite, as it were, in the first of Russia's major landscape painters

There is something of the same emotional dynamite, as it were, in the first of Russia's major landscape painters, who grasped the possibilities, open to them in showing raw Russian nature. Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900) came from the Crimea and was brought up on the Black Sea. He might technically be described as a marine painter, since perhaps two-thirds of his immense output of mainly large-scale works deals with the sea. But he is a marine painter only in the sense that Turner was one too. He is essentially, like Turner, a painter of nature's extremes: of those conjunctions or convulsions, of the seasons, of the times of day, of snow and ice, altitude, depth, wind and sun, which produce extraordinary sights. He achieved his first big popular success with Daryal Gorge (1862). This presents one of Eurasia's grandest natural phenomena, the equivalent of the Yosemite Valley (which Bierstadt was painting at exactly the same time), in all its staggering depth and precipitous, fear generating drama. Aivazovsky loved these freaks of nature, just as Constable loved sluggish streams, rotten posts and rushy backwaters. He sought them out in Central Asia, where he went by horse and camel, like Bierstadt with his mule-train, to explore, pinpoint nature's extravagance and catastrophes, and record them.

The sea, and its unfathomable rages, had the same kind of appeal to Aivazovsky. The Maiia in a Gale (1893) is one of the best renderings of a storm at sea done in the nineteenth century. In scale and movement it reminds one of Turner. Yet it is in no way Turneresque: this is a direct description of force, power and dynamism, not atmosphere, chemistry and elemental minglings. Ship, sea and sky do not dissolve into one continuum of varying light and colour, as with Turner. They are distinct and embittered protagonists; they fight each other with ferocity. Indeed, Aivazovsky aimed at clarity, in almost exactly the same

36 Storm at Cape Aiya, 1875