Beschreibung:

Classical Poets on a Moonlit Shore in Ancient Greece
Provenance: Property of a distinguished Greek family, Istanbul, until the 1950s. Anonymous Sale; The Russian Auction , Stockholms Auktionsverk, 4 October 2007, Lot 47. Acquired at the above sale by the present owner. Private collection, UK. Authenticity certificate from the expert V. Petrov. The work will be included in the forthcoming second volume of G. Caffiero and I. Samarine’s monograph on the artist. In his paintings Ivan Aivazovsky often turned to the subject of great poets, from the classical bards of the ancient world to more recent men of genius — Dante, Byron and Pushkin. Art historians are certain about many of the reasons that impelled the celebrated painter of seascapes towards portraying men of letters. For example, the artist was initially inspired to paint the great Russian poet when the two men met at the Imperial Academy of Arts, and subsequently after discussions with Pushkin’s friend Nikolai Raevsky and plans for an exhibition, marking the anniversary of the poet’s death. It was the mature master’s ideas on the meaning of life and art that found form in the work Dante Shows an Artist Some Unusual Clouds . The occasion of his painting, in 1898, the celebrated Byron Visiting the Mecharist Monastery on San Lazzaro Island in Venice was a flare-up of the Armenian question. However, Aivazovsky’s paintings devoted to the classical poets, works linked by motif and the time of their composition, represent a strange and intriguing, yet still little known, chapter in the artist’s biography. This small group consists of three works: the picture now offered for auction, Classical Poets on a Moonlit Shore in Ancient Greece , Acropolis of Athens in Ancient Times (private collection) and Wedding of a Poet in Ancient Greece (Art Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan). Painted in 1886, all three works are similar in size and all evoke an idyllic atmosphere of Arcadian harmony. However, despite these similarities, it is now hard to establish with any certainty, whether the choice of subject in these works was in response to a commission or simply the fruit of the artist’s unconstrained imagination. Either way, Classical Poets on a Moonlit Shore in Ancient Greece occupies a special place in his antiquity cycle. This heartfelt depiction of a peaceful nocturnal view of a Greek shore is distinguished from its daytime counterparts by a greater integrity. Here the portrayal is less detailed in the delineation of the terrain and its distinctive colouring. Unlike the other two works, in this picture Aivazovsky does not offer the viewer porticos of ancient temples to win them over. We can barely make out, through the gloom of night, the laurel wreaths and togas of the winners in the poetry contest. The poetic face of ancient Hellas is composed of different artistic ingredients. The moon, which has risen over the sea, framed by clouds, watches over the peace and silence of the sleeping, mirror-like surface of the water. The artist has conveyed perfectly the mystery of night, its power to transform the visible world, the close mystical connection between the moon and the sea that reveals itself on this kind of night. The beauty of the moonlight is expressed not only in the colouring of the pale night sky, but also in that of the sea, across which runs the luminous moonglade. The sea and rocks, bathed in spectral moonlight, evoke a Romantic sense of the vastness of the earth’s expanse and the delights with which it is filled. Aivazovsky laboured hard over his depiction of the moon, which he referred to as a “half-ruble moon”. His virtuosity at conveying the effects of moonlight playing on the clouds and the moonglade lying, trembling, on the water surface, became his greatest painting achievement and elicited admiring recognition from the public. Aivazovsky distributes the glitter of moonlight in vivid, bright, rhythmical brushstrokes and splashes, like golden sparks. They are ripples on the calm sea and, at the same time, visual highlights. Here