She bows before the tsar beneath the painted heroes on the wall

A young woman in a rose sarafan over a white shift worked with blue and red cross-stitch bows deep from the waist before the tsar and his boyars. The tsar stands at the centre in a fur-trimmed cap and a red and gold mantle, both hands closed on a tall staff, his beard white to his chest; the boyars press in behind him in brocades of pale blue, cream and brown. On the wall behind them Bilibin hung lubok broadsheets, their crowned riders captioned Alexander of Macedon and Tsar Porus of India. The whole drawing is held to a narrow range of rose, cream, ochre and pale blue so that the pattern rather than the colour carries it. Signed И.Б. 1919–1925, and again in Latin script, J. Bilibine — work of his years in emigration.

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.