"Ninth Wave" after restoration and exclusive from the Admiralty: what the Russian Museum shows at the Aivazovsky exhibition

On October 16, a large-scale exhibition "Aivazovsky" was opened in the Russian Museum. The exposition includes 120 works and more than 30 graphic sheets from the leading museums of Russia and Belarus. But its main feature was the painting "The Ninth Wave", which was first exhibited in the museum after restoration. The correspondent of "MK in St. Petersburg" Kamilla Latypova visited the exhibition to find out what the Russian Museum decided to show this time.

The restoration of the "Ninth Wave" took only four months. This is a truly legendary picture of Aivazovsky, many Petersburgers and guests of the city decided to look at it — on the day of the opening of the exposition, the queue to the Benois building stretched along the embankment of the Griboyedov Canal. There are a lot of people inside. Some have to stand in line to get closer to the paintings and look at them in detail. Greater immersion in the atmosphere is given by museum objects: ships, anchors, steering wheels, guns. There is also an interactive area where visitors can distract themselves from painting in digital format, listen to and watch videos of the raging sea.

The legendary painting of 1850 "The Ninth Wave", which opens the exposition, is also interesting in that its plot, presumably, was based on the personal experience of Ivan Aivazovsky. In the autumn of 1844, the ship on which he was sailing on the Bay of Biscay was caught in a severe storm. Some European newspapers of the time even reported the death of the artist, but everything, of course, worked out. Despite the fear, the marine painter watched the stormy element and carefully preserved all its features in his memory.

For the first time in the museum space, three large-format paintings by Aivazovsky from the collection of the Admiralty — the General Staff of the Navy were also presented: "Naval Battle of Navarino on October 8, 1827", "Naval Battle of Vyborg on June 22, 1790" and "Naval Battle of Reval on May 2, 1790". Works measuring about 2 by 3 meters had not been available to the public before.

The collection of the Russian Museum is considered one of the largest: it includes 54 masterpieces of the marine painter. There are also little-known works of the author at the exhibition, for example, "Creation of the World", "World Flood" and views of Kronstadt.