Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, Ива́н Константи́нович Айвазо́вский, was baptized into an Armenian Orthodox family as Hovhannes Aivazian.

While studying in Italy, he began using a Russian version of his name, Gaivazovsky, before eventually becoming Aivazovsky. In his late 20s, he became popular with the Russian monarchy, but declined a lucrative invitation to become a court painter, turning away from the role accepted by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Diego Velazquez, and Anthony van Dyck.

The artist was born in Feodosia, a Crimean town on the Black Sea which is, as of 2019, legally part of Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia. For centuries the town had been defined by its relationship to the ocean, the major focus of Aivozovsky's work: as the 14th century Moroccan scholar Ibn Battutah wrote of Feodosia, "we saw a wonderful harbor with about two hundred vessels in it, both ships of war and trading vessels, small and large, for it is one of the world's celebrated ports." However, by Aivazovsky's time a war had devastated the town, and a subsequent plague, just five years before Aivazovsky's birth, had removed nearly every trace of culture and commerce from Feodosia. "In old drawings, we see on the site of the once-rich city piles of ruins with barely visible traces of deserted streets and individual surviving houses." The Aivazovsky house, set in an elevated location on the outskirts of the city, offered the young artist a terrace with a wide panorama of the beautiful gulf landscape set against the ruins and vestiges of an ancient, once flourishing civilization.

At the age of twenty-one, Aivazovsky enrolled in the landscape art class of Professor M.N. Vorobyov in St. Petersburg, having impressed the school with his drawings. Receiving silver and gold medals from the Czarist government, he returned to Crimea to do his first major studies of the sea, including Moonlit Night in Gurzuf and Sea Coast, influenced by the work of S.F. Shchedrin and the landscapes of his teacher M.N. Vorobyov. From 1839-45, he traveled with the Russian navy and worked in Italy, making a series of brilliant works showing the relationship between sunlight, moonlight, and the behavior of the ocean. The Czar's navy made him the honorary Artist of the Naval Staff and permitted him to wear a uniform. Aivazovsky later decided to travel on his own, visiting many European cities, Egypt, and, at the age of eighty, the United States.