One of the manifestations of 'The World of Art' was a new preoccupation with folklore and myth. Aivazovskiy had, uncharacteristically, painted at least two such otherworldly pictures. One was 'Poseidon's Sea Journey' of 1894. The great god and his consort ride on a green-tinged wave in a chariot drawn by four horses.

Fairy tales were part of the new experimental milieu of the early twentieth century, and the young Armenian painter Martiros Saryan produced a cycle of fabulous paintings called 'Fairy Tales and Dreams' for the "Blue Rose" exhibition in Moscow in 1907. Among them was a compelling Gallery Oil Paintings 'Lake of Fairies', in which two women bathe in a limpid pale blue pool with the hint of a large grotto farther back, below a hanging wood of predominantly blue forest; a goat in the foreground grazes behind a little grove of trees.

In a later painting, 'The Varangian Route', the raiders slip through the difficult sea under the watchful eye of a man hidden high on a crag. As in the remainder of Roerich's work of the time, the colors and forms of the ship and seas are stylised. The splendid sea of the 'Route' is a series of heavily laid-on pastel strokes; with concentric ripples less of an attempt at realism as a shorthand representation of deep waters.

Although painting in Russia and elsewhere abandoned realism, and as landscape painting became an amateur activity, depictions of water became problematic. Yet in the immensely stylised work of Ivan Bilibin of the inter-war years, water becomes part of the decorative pattern, as in his 'Falcon' of 1927 and 'Underwater Kingdom' of the same year. The former is a formal, decorative version of a standard bird's-eye view of a river delta.

In many ways the real lead was about to be offered by a brilliant young graduate of the Academy, Ivan Aivazovskiy , whose long life in painting from the 1830s to the end of the century was obsessively devoted to painting that greatest body of water on earth, the sea.

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