A golden-maned white horse carries her over the hills to the sea

Two riders gallop across a country of stylised ochre and olive hills. A crowned young woman leads on a white horse whose mane and tail stream out in great golden curls, a white veil framing her face under a gold diadem, a rose gown beneath a red cloak blown back from her shoulders; beside her rides a dark-bearded man in a red conical helm-crown with a white plume, his orange caftan patterned with blue hearts and gold zigzags, on a brown horse in red harness. Below them a blue river winds down between the hills carrying a long ship with a scrolled prow — a square sail blazoned with an orange sun, a red pennant at the masthead, red and white shields hung along its side. Two white doves cross the cream scrollwork clouds above, and the sea shows blue and teal behind the riders. Every contour is drawn in firm pen line and filled with flat, transparent washes; signed И.Б. with the dates 1913 and 1918.

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.