Ship by Moonlight

Inscription: Signed or inscribed (lower right): A

Mary Jane Dastich, New York (until d. 1975)

Vitale Manin. Letter. received March 8, 1977, observes that although typical characteristics of Aivazovsky's work are present in this picture, the thickly applied brushstrokes for the water and large areas of bare ground are unusual.

Katharine Baetjer. European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 178, ill.

Aivazovsky was a self-identified Armenian and a subject of the Russian Empire who resided largely in Crimea, which is now part of Ukraine, and who lived and worked on the Ukrainian mainland in 1854–56, during the Crimean War. His national identities are complex. The Department of European Paintings currently describes Aivazovsky as “Armenian, born Russian Empire [now Ukraine],” to reflect the multiple and intersecting nationalities identified in scholarship on the artist.

On Aivazovsky’s national identities, see: Gianni Caffiero and Ivan Samarine, Light, Water, and Sky: The Paintings of Ivan Aivazovsky, London, 2012, pp. 20, 45–46; Shahen Khach'atryan, Айвазовский, известный и неизвестный / Aivazovsky, Well-known and Unknown, Samara, 2012, pp. 31–33, 36, 42–43; Grigory Goldovsky in Ivan Aivazovsky: On the 200th Anniversary of the Artist's Birth, St. Petersburg, 2016, p. 10; Vazken Khatchig Davidian, “Image of an Atrocity: Ivan (Hovhannes) Aivazovsky’s Massacre of the Armenians in Trebizond 1895,” Etudes arméniennes contemporaines 11 (2018), p. 47; and Andrey Kurkov et al., Treasures of Ukraine: A Nation’s Cultural Heritage, London, 2022, p. 144.

Aivazovsky signed his works in Armenian, Russian, and Latin script. The English transliteration of his Armenian name is Hovhannes Aivazian. The Russian form of his name is commonly transliterated into English as Ivan Aivazovsky, but multiple other spellings exist. The artist himself used Aivazovsky, Aivasovsky, and Aivasowsky.

This painting was given to The Met by the widow of Frantisek Dastich, a member of the Czechoslovakian resistance in World War II and a brigadier general in that nation’s military, who came to the United States after Communists gained power in Czechoslovakia in 1948.