The witch rides her mortar through a wood of birch and fly agaric

Baba Yaga hurtles through a birch wood in her wooden mortar, driving it forward with a long pestle; her besom, bound to its stick, stands among the birch trunks at the right. Bilibin gives her a pink blouse over a blue-grey bodice, a face of sharp bone, and white hair blown straight out by the wind of her own speed. The forest behind is a dense weave of olive, ochre and black, and scarlet fly agarics are scattered across the ground beneath her. A woven border in salmon and cream, taken from peasant embroidery, closes the plate. It comes from the 1902 Vasilisa the Beautiful, and carries Bilibin's signature and the date 1900 at the lower left.

Ivan Bilibin (1876–1942) studied under Ilya Repin and joined the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) circle in St Petersburg, building a graphic language out of Russian peasant embroidery, lubok broadsheets and the ornament of seventeenth-century manuscripts. From 1899 he drew a celebrated series of fairy-tale books for the Expedition for the Preparation of State Papers, working in firm black outline and flat colour so that every page could be reproduced exactly in chromolithography. He designed for the opera stage, spent the 1920s and early 1930s in Cairo and Paris, and returned to Leningrad in 1936, where he died during the wartime siege in 1942. His plates remain the images through which most readers picture Baba Yaga, the Firebird and the Tsar Saltan, and the original drawings are held by the Tretyakov Gallery and the State Russian Museum.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.