A firebird opens its wings over the apple tree

Bilibin's advertising poster for the fairy-tale series he was drawing for the state printing house. A coral-orange firebird spreads its wings across an apple tree hung with pale gold fruit, its tail falling away on both sides in long eyed plumes; below, a young man in a yellow flowered caftan and a white and red cap sits back on his heels and reaches up towards it. The lettered panel gives the series title СКАЗКИ, Bilibin's name, the publisher, and the price — seventy-five kopecks a tale — with the addresses on the Fontanka and the Nevsky. Ornamental bands in blue, coral and green close the sheet top and bottom, and six-pointed white stars are scattered over the deep blue ground.

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.