He looks across the water at the city that grew overnight

Prince Guidon stands on a flowering headland in a wide brown hat and a caftan of large red rosettes, a fringed teal sash in his hands, looking across the water at his city — white kremlin walls, green conical roofs and a crowd of gold and coloured domes stacked up the hill. A figure in a dark red patterned cloak sits on the slope beside him, and the foreground is thick with daisies, willowherb and blue and pink field flowers. Bilibin set Pushkin's verse in his own type down the centre of the page and closed it at the right with a tall panel: a sun with a human face above falling snow, a band of waves, and two roundels of birds, signed И.Б. and dated 1906.

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.