Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900) was born in Feodosia, Crimea, to Armenian parents, and is remembered as one of the Russian Empire’s great marine painters. Scale was part of it: his seascapes could run past 200 centimetres, and his 1850 The Ninth Wave — dark water tumbling under a livid orange sunset — measures 332 centimetres, close to eleven feet across. In 1887, at a dinner marking his seventieth birthday, he worked at the other extreme and gave each of his 150 guests a unique miniature painting: a seascape embedded in a studio photograph of himself, brush in hand.

The details are what stick:

  • Each miniature is 10.6 by 7.3 centimetres — about four by three inches, and roughly a thousandth the area of The Ninth Wave
  • The photograph underneath comes in two variants: in some he looks at the canvas, in others at his audience
  • A few cards are dated later than 1887, so the gifting practice seems to have outlived the dinner
  • About 6,000 paintings are attributed to him, which his contemporaries did not always regard as a compliment

Speed was the standard complaint. The critic Vladimir Stasov wrote that an artist who finishes a painting in two hours should “keep this unfortunate secret to himself” instead of modelling “carelessness and machine-like habits” for young students. Others went after the self-promotion. Visiting the gaudy Feodosia house in 1890, the writer and attorney Alexander Vladimirovich reckoned a stranger would take Aivazovsky for “a painter who had sunk into smug self-contemplation of his own bureaucratic position” — gilded furniture and a full-length portrait of himself in full regalia hung to impress visitors.

Both critiques are fair, and neither is the point. By painting directly onto photographs in 1887, decades before dada photomontage and long before Robert Rauschenberg collaged paint with photography, the grand Romantic was not too precious to make his own small experiment with form. A souvenir handed out at a birthday party turns out to be the earliest thing here — and the question of whether speed cheapens the work is left, properly, to taste.