‘The idealization of living nature is an extreme that I have always avoided in my paintings’, wrote the marine artist Ivan Aivazovsky, ‘but I have always felt, feel and try to convey the poetry of nature with my brush. The charm of a moonlit night, the bliss of a clear sunset, the horror of a storm or hurricane — these are the feelings that inspire me when I paint.’

Ivan Aivazovsky, a native of the Crimean city of Feodosia, left his mark in the history of art as a virtuoso creator of seascapes. He was an artist of the General Naval Staff, an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Arts, as well as a member of the Roman, Paris, Florentine, Stuttgart and Amsterdam Academies. Critics believed that Aivazovsky had a special flair for color and talent.

The artist developed a peculiar method of color-linear composition of paintings creating his own unique pictorial language. Ivan Kramskoy wrote to Pavel Tretyakov, 

In the legacy of Aivazovsky, there are many paintings (especially in the early period of his work), painted in rich colors.

‘Farewell’ is painted in rich colors of the setting southern sun. The translucency and tenderness of the colors give the painting the feeling of airiness, the effect of a pre-dusk haze. When evening comes, everything is painted in pink and lilac tones. In the foreground, on the shore, the farewell scene unfolds, which gave the name to the painting. Ivan Aivazovsky painted this picture in 1868, at the same time when the true realism that had previously brought him to fame was not his technique anymore.

The author’s versions of the painting are housed in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The Chelyabinsk State Museum of Fine Arts got “Farewell” from the storehouses of the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR in 1962. In addition to this picture, the Chelyabinsk collection has two more landscapes by Ivan Aivazovsky — “Herd of Sheep” and “Storm”.