Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky

G.Romanov, Russian Salon Painting 1850-1917: An Encyclopaedia, St. Petersburg: Zolotoi vek, 2004, illustrated p.44
G.Caffiero and I.Samarine, Seas, Cities and Dreams: The Paintings of Ivan Aivazovsky, London: Alexandria Press, 2000, illustrated p.164 plate 107, listed p.281 titled A Shepherd and his Flock in the Crimea

The canvas has been lined. There is some surface dirt and lines of craquelure throughout. There are very minor lines of paint loss in the lines of craquelure in an area above the tree. There is a line of indentation and retouching running horizontally in the top right corner of the painting, approximately 6cm from the top. There is frame abrasion and lines of light paint loss in the lower left corner, and some minor frame abrasion in places along the remaining edges, including some minor flecks of paint loss on the lower edge. The paint is quite thin in places to the sky. Overall, the condition is good. Held in a painted black wooden frame which is dented in numerous places.
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Ivan Aivazovsky first began painting large flocks of sheep on the steppe in the mid-1850s. The artist would often recount an episode which took place at his Crimean estate Sheikhmamai near Mount Agarmysh in 1855, when a storm killed a flock of sheep he owned. This event was initially the basis of a small sketch, now in The State Tretyakov Gallery, which he then developed into a larger painting Sheep Driven into the Sea by a Storm (private collection, USA). Aivazovsky would tell the story that, having sold the painting to an English collector, he was able to buy a new flock with the money he received.

The subject of grazing sheep was a theme which appears variously throughout the artist's oeuvre. Aivazovsky often depicted sheep grazing peacefully on the Crimean steppe or in Ukraine: lit by the light of the rising sun; before shearing; bathing in the Black Sea; during a rainstorm, or packed into a solid mass under the burning heat of the evening sun, as in the offered painting Shepherds with their Flock at Sunset in the Crimea.

There was something about the appearance of these peaceful creatures which attracted Aivazovsky. His interest in the dynamic, mobile texture of brushstrokes found a realisation in the thick fleece of sheep's wool. The artist paints wool with genuine painterly pleasure. Perhaps the tight curls on the animals' backs reminded him of the foaming crests of waves chasing after each other, known  as 'little lambs' in Russian. In the offered work the artist gives a marvellous rendering of the steppe during the summer heat, when everyone—the shepherds, weary from the scorching day, their flocks and the earth itself—await, at long last, the arrival of the cool, fresh evening.     

Aivazovsky exhibited a picture with a similar subject, Pasturing of Sheep in the Ukrainian Countryside, at the Academy of the Arts exhibition in St Petersburg in 1858. In the next year, 1859, he created another version of this picture. Over the course of the 1870s and 1880s the artist returned again and again to a theme which clearly captivated him.

In 1858 a reviewer for the newspaper The Russian Invalid wrote of the painting, 'We are accustomed to seeing sea views from Aivazovsky above all, but these views on dry land, how charming they are!... In Pasturing of Sheep at Sunset, the shepherds have gathered their enormous flock for the night around a large tree; the rays of the sun illuminate the sheep in the foreground with bright light, and in the distance the mountains are covered in the lightest possible haze, an incredible, transparent haze... To be certain of the extent to which nature is accurately depicted in this picture, one only has to spend some time in the Ukrainian steppe and the Crimean mountains; otherwise an untrusting viewer will question what he sees and think that this gifted artist has played with the brush for greater effect. With Mr Aivazovsky this is pure nature. Just as it is in the South.' Such was the opinion of a contemporary of the artist, a genuine and well-intentioned appreciator of the talent of Russia's most famous marine painter.

The lists of Aivazovsky's works compiled by his biographer Nikolai Sobko in 1893 and by Nikolai Barsamov in his 1962 monograph on the artist, which are both far from exhaustive, mention more than ten pictures with a similar subject. Some of these paintings can now be found in Museums in Omsk, Irkutsk, Odessa, Ashgabat, Ulan-Ude, Chelyabinsk and others (fig.2). One of these paintings—Sheep at Pasture (1850s)—is held at the Tretyakov Gallery.

The great marine painter, who loved the sea so passionately and depicted it in so many different states—calm, raging, concealing storms, during the morning sunrise or on a moonlit night, nevertheless often turned to subjects on land. His large canvases and small plates showing the steppe, ripening crops and slow-moving wagon trains pulled by bulls remind us of heavy ships, and the blades of the windmills are similar to light sailboats. In both his seascapes and his landscapes Aivazovsky maintained a romantic intonation when depicting the everyday, elevating even the most prosaic subject to the level of the poetic.

We are grateful to Galina Churak, head of the department for Russian painting of the second half of the XIX century at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, for writing this note.