Rufin Sudkovsky was one of the few masters who devoted themselves to Russian marine painting of the second half of the 19th century. For the beautiful colors and elegance of his paintings, he is often placed on a par with the marine masters such as Ivan Aivazovsky, Alexey Bogolyubov and Lev Lagorio.

Rufin Sudkovsky was born into a priest’s family on April 7, 1850, in the old city of Ochakov, Kherson Governorate. Three generations of the Sudkovskys were priests, and the future artist was also assigned to a religious school at the age of 12. After that, Sudkovsky studied at a theological seminary. Along with his studies, he began to attend evening classes at the drawing school of the Society of Fine Arts in Odessa, where his talent and love for marine subjects were instantly recognized. The famous marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky said upon seeing Sudkovsky’s drawing from his student years:

In 1868, Sudkovsky left the seminary and went to St. Petersburg, where he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts. He received large and small silver medals for his landscape sketches. Three personal exhibitions of the artist were held in St. Petersburg. At one of them, he presented the painting “The Storm near Ochakov”, for which he was awarded the title of academician. He wrote about the nature of his native land: the Black Sea coast from Ochakov to Odessa. The clay, hilly banks of the Dnieper-Bug estuary, covered with brown burnt grasses for most of the year, were dearer to the artist’s heart than the famous beauties of Italy and Switzerland.

Sudkovsky had a short life dying of typhoid fever at the age of 35. His artwork includes over three hundred paintings and sketches, with most of them portraying the sea. State Museum Association “Art Culture of the Russian North” has one of his studies — “Odessan Limans”, painted in 1876 on the outskirts of Odessa. Sudkovsky depicted the heavily clouded sky with a silvery-white streak of light near the horizon to enliven the landscape. The artist used a muted earthy palette to convey the pre-storm atmosphere.