Gibraltar by Night 

Ivan Aivazovsky painted “Gibraltar by Night,” using oil on canvas, and it evokes the Romantic tradition of maritime painting. The drama of the scene—ships tossed by a turbulent sea under a clouded moon—speaks to the power of nature. Painted in nineteenth-century Russia, it is difficult to separate this image from that country’s imperial ambitions. Aivazovsky was, after all, attached to the Naval Staff. Gibraltar, a British territory since 1713, was a strategic point in the Mediterranean. What does it mean that this Russian painter chose to depict this territory? Is it a simple landscape? Or does it reveal something about the Russian Empire’s naval competition with Great Britain? To truly understand a painting like this, we have to do some historical work, examining both Russian and British naval records, and studying the exhibition histories of paintings of this kind. The meaning of art is always contingent on its historical moment.