Following the success in 2000 of Seas, Cities, and Dreams, the authors return with a second volume on the works of this remarkable 19th-century master who raised European maritime painting to a new level. A towering figure in his day, he shot to international fame at an early age. His exhibitions drew enormous crowds from all over the world and earned him the admiration of Vernet and Turner. He was elected a member of five European academies and was personally acquainted with most of the crowned heads of his day. Throughout his long and colorful career Aivazovsky claimed to have painted over 6,000 pictures. The authors—the foremost experts on the artist—have gathered the material for this book from public and private collections worldwide. The large number of paintings illustrated offer a significant addition to the published corpus of Aivazovsky's oeuvre. Their chronological arrangement makes this book an invaluable resource for scholars, collectors, and Aivazovsky's many admirers.

The story of Ivan Aivazovksy is peerless in the history of art. A poor boy from an obscure Black Sea port, he ended his life as the best-known Russian painter ever. His exhibitions all over the world drew enormous crowds and earned him admiration from the likes of Horace Vernet and William Turner. Today, Aivazovsky's work passes constantly through salesrooms and is eagerly sought after by collectors. Published on the hundredth anniversary of his death, this is the first book on the artist in English. Over 200 of his works are reproduced in color, most for the first time. The lively text offers insights into the working methods of a man who raised European maritime painting to new heights.

From the 18th century to the 20th, this book gives a panorama of Russian painting not equalled anywhere else. Russian culture developed in contact with the wider European influence, but retained strong native intonations. It is a culture between East and West, and both influences in together. The book begins with Icons, and it is precisely Icon-painting which gave Russian artist their peculiar preoccupation with ethical questions and a certain kind of palette. It goes on the expound the duality of their art, and point out the originality of their contribution to world art. The illustrations cover all genres and styles of painting in astonishing variety. Such figures as Borovokovsky, Rokotov, Levitsky, Brullov, Fedatov, Repin, Shishkin and Levitan and many more are in these pages.

In the days of pastoral, nomadic peoples, long before railroad tracks and modern roads ever existed, it was the rivers, lakes and seas that provided the means of transportation, irrigated the fields, and offered a natural way for people to keep in touch. The Volga boatmen, singing with great gusto as they accompanied heavy loads of wheat and other cargo along the inland canals of Russia, left a legacy of songs that are still popular today. It is little wonder that Russian painters found such powerful inspiration in the rivers, lakes and seas that flow so abundantly throughout the vast country. A symbol of life, of purity, and of the regeneration of body and soul, water also conveys a sense of danger, the threat of overwhelming force. For Russian poets, writers, and artists, it was often the sight and sound and symbolism of water that inspired them to express a whole range of feelings.

Ivan Aivazovsky was Russian painter living and working in Crimea, most famous for his seascapes. He is widely considered as one of the greatest seascape painters of all times.Throughout his lifetime, Aivazovsky contributed over 6,000 paintings to the art world, ranging from his early landscapes. He was especially effective at developing the play of light in his paintings, sometimes applying layers of color to create a transparent quality, a technique for which they are highly admired. Although he produced many portraits and landscapes, over half of all of Aivazovsky's paintings are realistic depictions of coastal scenes and seascapes. His technique and imagination in depicting the shimmering play of light on the waves and seafoam is especially admired, and gives his seascapes a romantic yet realistic quality that echoes the work of English watercolorist J. M. W. Turner. In addition to being the most prolific of Russian Armenian painters, Aivazovsky founded an art school and gallery to engage and educate other artists of the day. He also and built a historical museum in his hometown on Feodosia, Crimea, in addition to beginning the first archaeological expeditions of the same region.He spent his last years in Feodosia where he supplied the town with water from his own estate. Aivasovsky died in Feodosiya in 1900.

This is a definitive, deeply researched biography of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) and is the first scholarly biography to be published in any language. The book is Todes's magnum opus, which he has been working on for some twenty years. Todes makes use of a wealth of archival material to portray Pavlov's personality, life, times, and scientific work. Combining personal documents with a close reading of scientific texts, Todes fundamentally reinterprets Pavlov's famous research on conditional reflexes. Contrary to legend, Pavlov was not a behaviorist (a misimpression captured in the false iconic image of his "training a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell"); rather, he sought to explain not simply external behaviors, but the emotional and intellectual life of animals and humans. This iconic "objectivist" was actually a profoundly anthropomorphic thinker whose science was suffused with his own experiences, values, and subjective interpretations. This book is also a traditional "life and times" biography that weaves Pavlov into some 100 years of Russian history-particularly that of its intelligentsia--from the emancipation of the serfs to Stalin's time. Pavlov was born to a family of priests in provincial Ryazan before the serfs were emancipated, made his home and professional success in the glittering capital of St. Petersburg in late imperial Russia, suffered the cataclysmic destruction of his world during the Bolshevik seizure of power and civil war of 1917- 1921, rebuilt his life in his 70s as a "prosperous dissident" during the Leninist 1920s, and flourished professionally as never before in 1929-1936 during the industrialization, revolution, and terror of Stalin. Todes's story of this powerful personality and extraordinary man is based upon interviews with surviving coworkers and family members (along with never-before-analyzed taped interviews from the 1960s and 1970s), examination of hundreds of scientific works

The Russian Canvas charts the remarkable rise of Russian painting in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the nature of its relationship with other European schools. Starting with the foundation of the Imperial Academy of the Arts in 1757 and culminating with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, it details the professionalization and wide-ranging activities of painters against a backdrop of dramatic social and political change. The Imperial Academy formalized artistic training but later became a foil for dissent, as successive generations of painters negotiated their own positions between pan-European engagement and local and national identities. Drawing on original archival research, this groundbreaking book recontextualizes the work of major artists, revives the reputations of others, and explores the complex developments that took Russian painters from provincial anonymity to international acclaim.