Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ivan Aivazovsky was a Russian Romantic painter of Armenian descent, born in 1817 in Feodosia, Crimea. He is considered one of the greatest masters of marine art and produced around 6,000 paintings over a nearly 60-year career, the vast majority of them seascapes. He was appointed the official artist of the Russian Navy and was the first Russian to receive the Legion of Honour.
Aivazovsky was born on the 29th of July 1817 in Feodosia, a Black Sea port in Crimea, part of the Russian Empire. His birth name was Hovhannes Aivazian, and he was born to Armenian parents. His father's family had emigrated from Western Armenia to the Polish region of Galicia in the 18th century before eventually settling in Feodosia.
The Ninth Wave is widely considered Aivazovsky's finest work. Art historian Rosa Newmarch described it as marking the transition between the fantastic color of his earlier works and the more truthful vision of his later years. It was painted in the 1840s-1850s period when his work combined epic scale with vivid color.
Aivazovsky produced around 6,000 paintings during his nearly 60-year career. One count attributes as many as 20,000 works to him. He held 55 solo exhibitions over his career, an unprecedented number, in cities including Rome, Paris, London, Constantinople, and New York.
Aivazovsky was deeply affected by the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896 and painted several works on the subject, including The Armenian Massacres at Trebizond in 1895 and Night: Tragedy in the Sea of Marmara in 1897. He gathered the medals the Ottoman Sultan had previously bestowed on him and threw them into the sea, then told the Turkish consul in Feodosia to inform the Sultan what he had done.
The Aivazovsky National Art Gallery in Feodosia holds 417 of his paintings, the world's largest collection. Aivazovsky himself founded the gallery in his Feodosia house in 1880; it became the third museum in the Russian Empire at the time, after the Hermitage and the Tretyakov Gallery.