In the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, few historical figures are as awkwardly placed as artist Ivan Aivazovsky.

Born in Feodosia, Crimea, on the Black Sea coast in 1817, the city of Aivazovsky’s birth now under Russian occupation but still internationally recognised as part of Ukraine. In his youth he was educated in the Russian imperial system, later becoming the official painter of the Russian navy and was eventually celebrated throughout the Russian Empire although always returning to his Crimean home where he spent most of his life.

But Aivazovsky was not ethnically Russian. His birth name was Hovhannes Aivazian and his parents were displaced Armenians. His family had roots in the west of Armenia and in the years before Hovhannes was born had moved through Galicia, Moldavia and Bukovina before finally settling in Feodosia – a town with a once sizeable ethnic Armenian population.

He was baptised in the local Armenian Apostolic church and later in his life signed paintings in Armenian. While travelling widely and exhibiting his works across Europe and the United States, he spent time painting the Ottoman capital of Constantinople and visited Egypt to mark the opening of the Suez Canal before spending his later years in a Crimean city whose identity has today become one of the most explosive questions in the region.

As of mid-2026, however, the artist with work hanging in the National Palaces Painting Museum in Istanbul, the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and The National Gallery of Armenia in Yerevan is claimed by both Russia and Ukraine.

Separate claims

For Russia, Aivazovsky is one of the great painters of Russian art. His career was made possible by the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg – another city in which his work hangs at the State Russian Museum. He painted the Russian navy, attended fleet manoeuvres and received honours from the imperial state. In time, his work became so closely associated with Russian culture and the Russian state, that the phrase “worthy of Aivazovsky’s brush” became a synonym for something exceptionally beautiful.

For Ukraine, he was born and lived in Crimea, a region internationally recognised as Ukrainian territory. He painted Ukrainian landscapes and coastal scenes for which he remains internationally respected – his most expensive known auction sale the ‘View of Constantinople and the Bosphorus’, which fetched £3.23mn ($4.3mn) at Sotheby’s in London in 2012 . His home and studio, now a museum marking his life and works were and are in Feodosia. The modern Ukrainian state inherited the territory in which he was born, worked and died. But after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the question of whether artists born in the Russian Empire should automatically be labelled Russian became politically charged.

Yet Aivazovsky was Armenian first in a way that both sides of the present dispute have found somewhat inconvenient. He was also a man of the Black Sea. His life moved through imperial borders that were far less fixed than the national categories now being imposed upon him, over a century after his death.

In this regard, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York became an early and wholly unexpected battleground in this dispute. In early 2023, the museum was reported to have reclassified Aivazovsky as a Ukrainian artist, alongside other painters born in territories that are now part of Ukraine.

The decision was initially welcomed in Kyiv, albeit as war raged on multiple fronts at the time, and seen as part of a wider effort to recover Ukrainian cultural figures from what Ukraine and Ukrainians see as centuries of Russian imperial and Soviet appropriation. The Kyiv Post at the time described the move as part of the “decolonisation” of Ukrainian art.

Russia, as expected, was not happy and reacted angrily.

The controversy was not merely academic though. Moscow has increasingly treated cultural classification as part of the broader war over its historical legitimacy. Given that Russia's argument and at least a part of its justification for its invasion in early 2022 is that Ukraine is not a fully separate civilisation, then the removal of artists from the category of Russian culture becomes politically significant.

Yet at the same time if Ukraine's argument is based on Russian imperial power having absorbed and later claimed the cultural output of the peoples and territories it controlled, then reclaiming those artists – Aivazovsky included – becomes an act of historical correction.

The painter from Feodosia sits precisely on that fault line.

But the Met in New York soon discovered that a simple Ukrainian-versus-Russian classification was inadequate. The Armenian angle had yet to feature.

Following objections from Armenian commentators and the powerful Armenian-American community, the museum changed its description once more. Aivazovsky was identified as Armenian, born in the Russian Empire, now Ukraine.

His Armenian birth name, Hovhannes Aivazian, was restored to prominence and the revised biography stressed his connection to the Armenian community of Feodosia and his wider international activity. Around the same time, The Guardian reported that the painter, initially reclassified as Ukrainian in the US, has subsequently been listed as Armenian after the controversy.

Then and now

Aivazovsky's life does not fit neatly into the modern map though.

Having been born with an Armenian name in a Crimean port whose history stretches back through Greek, Byzantine, Ottoman, Tatar and Russian worlds to an Armenian father whose family had travelled across eastern Europe, there are, in theory at least, stronger Armenian than Russian or Ukrainian claims to the artist. His elder brother, Gabriel, became a well known Armenian Catholic archbishop, scholar and historian. The family was part of a long-standing Armenian presence in Crimea.

As a youngster, Aivazovsky was educated at the Armenian Apostolic church in Feodosia before moving into the Russian imperial educational system under which he studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. In Russia, he entered the world of high culture and started to earn a name for himself in the imperial establishment.

He was also, in the most practical sense, a product of the sea.

The northern coast of the Black Sea was his childhood horizon. His professional career was built around the sea as any list of his output demonstrates. His reputation was made through images of storms, naval battles, moonlit harbours, sinking ships and the fragile human relationship with water. The iconic 1874, oil on canvas ‘Shipwreck in Stormy Sea’ hanging today in the gallery of the Dolmabahçe Palace on the European shore of Istanbul’s Bosphorus is one of the best known examples of his work.

The Russian state recognised that talent early. Aivazovsky was appointed the official artist of the Russian navy. He attended military manoeuvres and painted the fleet multiple times. Sources suggest he even went on manoeuvres aboard ship. He produced scenes of Russian naval victories, including battles against the Ottoman Empire. His work was admired by emperors, admirals and the Russian aristocracy.

And this is the part of his biography that makes the Ukrainian claims to Aivazovsky difficult to sustain if it is presented as a simple assertion that he was Ukrainian in the modern national sense. He was not.

On the other hand, the Russian claim is equally incomplete.

The imperial Russia that made Aivazovsky famous was not the same thing as the Russian Federation of the 21st Century. It was a multinational empire patched together through force as well as cultural similarities. Aivazovsky's identity was shaped by his Armenian family in a Crimean birthplace, Russian education, a great deal of European travel and a career that extended across the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. A Lutheran wife from England and a second, much younger Armenian wife would also play their part.

His own life repeatedly crossed borders that later nationalisms would and are seeking to harden.

International fame

In the early 1840s Aivazovsky travelled through Europe. In Italy he visited Venice, Florence, Naples, Rome, Amalfi and Sorrento. He spent time at San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice, the centre of an important Armenian Catholic congregation, where his brother Gabriel was living. There he studied Armenian manuscripts and encountered Armenian intellectual and artistic traditions. He signed works from that time with an Italian version of his name.

This was not the journey of a provincial Russian painter committed to the state.

Aivazovsky absorbed Europe and few can today look at his work without wondering the extent to which he was influenced by the likes of English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner who was himself renowned for seascapes, and was born 40 years before Aivazovsky.

He exhibited in Paris. He travelled through Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain. He visited Portugal, Spain and Malta. He was the only representative from Russia at one international exhibition at the Louvre in the French capital where he won honours. He was admired across the continent in his day.

Aivazovsky’s career was international long before the word became fashionable.

Throughout his life though, he also remained deeply attached to the Black Sea.

In 1845 he returned to Feodosia and built a house and studio. The artist who could have lived permanently in the imperial capitals of the Western world chose instead to make his Crimean birthplace the centre of his world. This was a decision that resonates today.

Aivazovsky's Feodosia was not simply a place where he happened to live. The city became his studio, his museum and his laboratory. He opened an art gallery in 1880. He helped develop local infrastructure by supporting local archaeological work and helping to bring drinking water to the city. His house became one of the earliest museums in the Russian Empire outside the major imperial centres of St. Petersburg and Moscow.

Feodosia at the time was a place where identities overlapped. Armenians, Russians, Greeks, Tatars and others lived within the wider political world of the Russian Empire, and The Black Sea was much more than a large national lake for holidaying Russians. It was a zone of movement.

Aivazovsky understood that world instinctively and his paintings travelled as widely as he did.

From its shores he painted the Russian fleet. He painted Constantinople, now Istanbul, to the south. Many times he took his easel and brushes to paint the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn and the Ottoman coastline. Further south he painted the Mediterranean. In North Africa he painted Egypt after travelling there for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 – in the process becoming the first person to ever paint the Canal. He travelled around the Caucasus and painted Mount Ararat, the Ararat plain and Lake Sevan. His work was exhibited in New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

Aivazovsky's imagination was therefore never confined to the political geography of the Russian Empire.

Ottoman links

His relationship with the Ottoman world was particularly important.

Aivazovsky visited Constantinople in 1845 when still in his twenties, and returned several times. His paintings of the city and the Bosphorus became popular at the Ottoman court, so much so that Sultan Abdülaziz commissioned works from him and awarded him the Order of Osmanieh. Aivazovsky painted the city from memory, transforming its waters and skyline into some of the most recognisable images of nineteenth-century Constantinople.

Even today his paintings remain in Turkey with the Turkish state preserving a substantial body of Aivazovsky's work. Paintings are held in former Ottoman palaces, military and naval museums as well as presidential collections and other public institutions. The artist's relationship with Constantinople was sufficiently important that his work remains part of the visual history of the city he repeatedly painted. Because of this, for anyone walking through Istanbul's museums today, the cultural argument surrounding Aivazovsky can appear almost absurdly narrow.

Here is an Armenian-born artist from Crimea, trained in St Petersburg, celebrated by the Russian imperial establishment, honoured in France, exhibited in Europe and America, closely associated with the Ottoman court, and buried in an Armenian church.

So which country truly ‘owns’ him?

The war over Aivazovsky is not really about whether he personally would have described himself as Ukrainian. He could not have done so in the modern political sense, largely because Ukraine was not an independent state during his lifetime. Nor is the dispute resolved by pointing out that he was widely known as a Russian artist. That description is historically accurate in one context, but insufficient in another.

While Aivazovsky's naval paintings are central to the Russian claim, with his work commissioned and celebrated by the imperial state, his Crimean life supports the Ukrainian claim.

So does the house where he worked being in territory internationally recognised as Ukraine and the modern day reality that during the Russian invasion, works by Aivazovsky became caught up in the physical struggle over cultural property.

In 2022, Ukrainian authorities accused Russian forces of removing artworks from museums in Mariupol, including works by Aivazovsky, and taking them to Russian-controlled Donetsk. Ukraine also reported that paintings by the artist were removed from the Kherson Art Museum before Russian forces withdrew from the city. The Guardian covered Ukrainian claims at the time that more than 2,000 artworks had been taken from Mariupol museums, including works by Aivazovsky.

The argument over identity had thus become one accompanied by a physical struggle over possession.

Russia's claim rests on the powerful fact that Aivazovsky was a celebrated artist of the Russian Empire. Ukraine rests on geography, the inheritance of Crimea and the wider effort to recover cultural figures whose lives unfolded under imperial rule.

The Armenian dimension, however, complicates both.

Aivazovsky's Armenian identity was not an incidental footnote. His family history mattered to him. With a sibling recognised as an Armenian religious and intellectual figure, his Armenian identity was private, cultural, religious and political all at the same time and at different moments throughout his life.

It was not erased by his Russian career, nor was it erased by his Crimean birthplace.

The insistence on a single national label therefore does an injustice to the very life that makes Aivazovsky interesting. He was not a modern nationalist transported backwards in time.

Instead, he was an imperial subject who moved easily through an international world. His identity was layered because the nineteenth century was layered and Armenian communities like the one he belonged to were dispersed across several states. The Ottoman and Russian worlds collided around the Black Sea. Europe was becoming more connected even as national movements were becoming more powerful.

Aivazovsky belonged to all of those worlds, but exclusively to none of them.

The seas that feature so often in his paintings offer an appropriate metaphor in that a coastline suggests a border. The water erases it.

Russia wants Aivazovsky inside the story of Russian greatness. Ukraine wants him recovered from the imperial story that it believes has historically absorbed its own. Armenians insist that the man called Ivan was born Hovhannes and belonged to a people whose history cannot be reduced to the empire in which he achieved fame.

The strongest answer is not to choose one claim and erase the others. It is to accept multiple claims at the same time, while understanding that the Black Sea Aivazovsky loved so much is larger than the borders drawn around it.