A Thousandth of a Wave
In 1887, for his seventieth birthday, Ivan Aivazovsky gave each of 150 guests a seascape painted into a photograph of himself at the easel. The Public Domain Review says each one is "almost a thousandth of the size" of his Ninth Wave. Here they are side by side at true scale, with the small one in the corner.
The numbers
| Item | Size | Source |
|---|---|---|
| The Ninth Wave, 1850 | 221 × 332 cm | Wikipedia (State Russian Museum) |
| The photograph, Babaev Studio | 25.7 × 19.3 cm | Metropolitan Museum of Art, object 286403 (Gilman Collection, purchased 2005) |
| The painting on it | 10.6 × 7.3 cm | Met: "Image (inset oil painting): 10.6 × 7.3 cm" |
| Area ratio | 73,372 ÷ 77.4 = 948 | my arithmetic: "almost a thousandth" is right |
The rest of the PDR's numbers hold too. Wikipedia gives the dinner for 150 friends in 1887 and about 6,000 paintings over his career. The Met's copy is dated 1893, six years after the dinner, which fits the PDR's remark that "a few are dated later than 1887".
One thing the PDR leaves out is a surname. It quotes "the writer and attorney Alexander Vladimirovich" on a visit to Aivazovsky's house in 1890. That is a first name and patronymic, the way Russians address someone, not a full name. The likeliest candidate is Alexander Vladimirovich Zhirkevich (1857–1927), a poet, prose writer and military lawyer who kept diaries of his meetings with artists and collected Aivazovsky. That identification is my inference, from the Russian Wikipedia article on Zhirkevich; I have not seen the passage itself.
What stands on what
| Item | Source |
|---|---|
| Images | The Ninth Wave: Wikimedia Commons (Google Art Project, public domain). The miniature: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access, public domain. |
| Dinner, 150 guests, 6,000 paintings | Wikipedia, Ivan Aivazovsky |
| Zhirkevich | Russian Wikipedia, Жиркевич, Александр Владимирович |
| The PDR's wording | "Ivan Aivazovsky's Miniature Seascapes (ca. 1887)" |