Ivan Aivazovsky is an outstanding Russian artist known for his seascapes. He painted the View of Yalta from Livadia Park in 1861, when Emperor Alexander II acquired the Yalta estate. The estate became the summer residence of the imperial family for several decades to come, and Ivan Aivazovsky was a frequent guest there.

This landscape is not quite typical for a marine painter: Aivazovsky did not depict the sea in the foreground, allocating just a small part of the canvas to it. In the center of the picture is a bay located among the hills. The lofty slopes of the Mogabi Mountain are covered with dark green forests that take the viewer’s eyes deep into the composition. Polikurovsky Hill crowned by the Church of John Chrysostom is rising above the bay.

Ivan Aivazovsky was born in 1817 in the family of an Armenian merchant. When the future artist was small, his father went bankrupt, but this did not stop Ivan Aivazovsky from getting a decent education. He became interested in art during his green years, and since then the Crimean nature was a source of inspiration for him. Aivazovsky’s interest in painting was noticed by the mayor of Theodosia Alexander Kaznacheev. He gave the boy a present of paper and paints and suggested that he should study painting from architect Jacob Koch.

Thanks to the patronage of Alexander Kaznacheev, Ivan Aivazovsky graduated from a gymnasia school in his native city and got a scholarship at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. In the capital, he studied under the famous landscape painter Maxim Vorobyov whose canvases decorated royal palaces. Another mentor of the future marine painter was Philippe Tanner, a French artist who masterfully depicted water.