The artwork of the Russian-Armenian great marine artist Hovhannes Aivazovsky kept at the Aivazovsky National Art Gallery in Feodosia, Crimea, will be digitized, TASS news agency reported. As the Minister of Culture of Crimea Arina Novoselskaya said, the museum will be reconstructed to have a museum district with the expected opening in 2022.

“The collection of the artwork is not yet digitized yet it is planned,” Novoselskaya told the agency, adding no time frame for the completion of the digitization is set yet.

The Aivazovsky National Art Gallery is a national art museum in Feodosia. In 1845, Ivan Aivazovsky acquired a plot in the outskirts of Feodosiya, on the very seashore. He decided to build a house with a big art studio and dreamed to establish a school of painting there. The same year, 1845, the first exhibition comprising 49 works was opened in a part of the house.

The Art Gallery in Feodosiya was the first one-painter museum in the Russian Empire and has grown very famous even in Aivazovsky's lifetime. Besides the fact that unique pictorial canvases were exhibited here, prominent musician and actors – marine painter's friends – performed on the stage specially mounted in the gallery.

To note, Aivazovsky is considered one of the greatest marine artists in history. Baptized as Hovhannes Aivazian, Aivazovsky was born into an Armenian family in the Black Sea port of Feodosia and was mostly based in his native Crimea.