The shirts are carried in, and the girl who wove them waits

The last plate of the book. An old woman in a black coat with a red hem bows low, holding out the linen shirts Vasilisa has woven, while Vasilisa herself stands beside her in an embroidered white and gold sarafan with her hair in a plait. Boyars in green lattice and figured brocade lean on their staves around them, two elders in scarlet stand under a carved gateway, and a rooster and a white hen pick at the ground; through the arch lie a river and a white town with green and blue domes. Below the illustration Bilibin set the closing paragraphs of the tale between ornamental columns, and finished with his tailpiece and the word КОНЕЦЪ — The End.

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.