Passage of the Jews through the Red Sea

Biblical subjects appear throughout Aivazovsky's career, and the Passage of the Jews through the Red Sea — one of the most dramatic episodes in Exodus — gave him the opportunity to combine his unmatched command of water with a subject of ancient religious and cultural significance. Painted in 1891, this large-scale work engages a tradition stretching back through European religious painting to the Renaissance. The parting of the waters presented a compositional challenge unlike any natural sea scene: two walls of standing water forming a corridor through which the Israelites pass, with the Egyptian army pursuing. Aivazovsky's method — rendering water as something semi-transparent and animated by internal light — was uniquely suited to imagining what a wall of parted sea might actually look like. His Armenian background gave him particular interest in Old Testament subjects as part of a shared Judeo-Christian heritage.

The composition organizes the parted sea into two lateral masses of standing water that frame the human procession moving through the center. Aivazovsky renders the water walls with his characteristic glazing technique — translucent green-blue with light appearing to emerge from within — scaled up to monumental effect. The Israelite multitude is treated in broad, summary strokes to convey scale rather than individual detail.