OIL PAINTING: A bay Near Venice, 1842
The great success of Karl Briullov's painting The Last Day of Pompeii made a lasting impression on Aivazovsky, summing up as it did the victory of the Romantic school in the Russian painting. Both the painting and Briullov himself played an important part in stimulating Aivazovsky's own creative development. In general Russian art of the first half of the nineteenth century combined Romanticism with Realism and very often both principles found expression in an artist's works. This was especially evident in landscape painting, an essentially realistic art form which continued romantic features for a long time. Aivazovsky acquired a romantic outlook in his student years and maintained it in maturity. Aivazovsky remained to the end one of the most faithful disciples of Romanticism, although this did not prevent him from evolving his own form of realism.