One figure on the shore, one swan on the sea, one great cloud

A tall narrow panel set between two columns of verse. Prince Guidon stands with his back to us on a brown shore in a teal caftan patterned with yellow palmettes, a green pointed cap banded in gold and green boots; out on the grey-green water the white swan swims. Above him one great cloud, drawn as flat shapes with a dotted contour, fills two thirds of the panel against a slate and teal sky. It is the quietest image in the book and the least crowded — two tones of water, one bird, one figure — and a geometric band in dark teal and olive closes it. The verse either side is set in Bilibin's own type; the panel is signed and dated 1905.

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.