For Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900), born in Feodosia, Crimea, to Armenian parents and often memorialized as one of the Russian Empire’s great marine painters, capturing the sea usually called for large canvases. His turbulent, light-drenched seascapes could be panoramic, stretching more than 200 centimetres (about 6.5 feet) wide. His 1850 masterpiece The Ninth Wave, an oil-painted maelstrom of dark waves against a livid orange sunset, measures 332 centimetres (almost 11 feet) across. But in 1887, Aivozovsky proved he could work at a much smaller scale just as easily. At a celebration marking his seventieth birthday, the artist presented each of his 150 dinner guests with a unique miniature painting: tiny vistas embedded in a studio photograph of himself, poised with brush in hand. At just 10.6 by 7.3 centimetres (about 4 by 3 inches), the paintings are each almost a thousandth of the size of The Ninth Wave. There are two variations of the underlying photograph — in some, he looks at the canvas, in others, at the audience — and a few are dated later than 1887, perhaps implying that Aivazovsky continued the gifting practice for years after the dinner.
