Stars above, and a sealed barrel riding the crest of the wave

A sealed barrel rides the crest of a green wave under a night sky scattered with white, gold and pink stars. Bilibin builds the whole sheet from outline and flat colour — three or four greens for the water, a band of dark blue for the horizon, and spray drawn as curling pale tendrils that climb up into the star field until sea and sky run together. A woven ornamental band in olive and dark green closes the image. Beneath it, in his own red lettering, are Pushkin's lines: In the blue sky the stars are shining, in the blue sea the waves are beating; a cloud moves across the sky, a barrel floats upon the sea. From The Tale of Tsar Saltan, 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.