The Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts houses “Gurzuf” by the famous marine painter Lev Feliksovich Lagorio.

At the age of 16, Lev Lagorio enrolled in Maxim Vorobyov’s class of landscape painting at the Academy of Arts as a non-matriculated student. Lev Lagorio was familiar with Crimean nature from early childhood. As a student of the Academy, he visited the peninsula to paint picturesque landscapes. In Feodosia, he met the great marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky. The young Lev Lagorio was enchanted by the famous master’s seascapes. This meeting largely determined his future creative career and made the genre of seascape his favorite one. At the Academy, Lev Lagorio was awarded a gold medal for his excellent achievements and received the right to a sponsored trip to Europe. The young artist’s landscapes were highly appreciated by the Academy’s Council which expressed its hope that “he would become one of the most remarkable artists of the Russian school.”

In 1880, an unusual event was organized in St. Petersburg where Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi arranged a one-painting exhibition in his studio. Visitors were amazed by his “Moonlit Night on the Dnieper” and many of them tried to look behind the canvas for a hidden source of illumination that would have explained the secret of the brightly shining moon in the night sky. After that, a moonlit night became one of the favorite motifs in Russian art. Five years later, Lev Lagorio also decided to depict such a scene and created his painting “Gurzuf” praising the beauty of the southern coast of Crimea.

The displayed painting features a typical Crimean landscape with the famous Ayu-Dag or the “Bear Mountain”. The summit resembles a giant dome or a large bear drinking water from the sea. Lev Lagorio always began his work with a plein-air study. In this painting, he strove to tell a story, with the image of one particular area representing the features of various locations in Crimea. This landscape expressed Lagorio’s focus on the clear forms and accurate depiction of foreground details with a more generalized background.