Long green combers, a red hull, and a mosquito closing on the sail

A red-hulled ship under a great cream sail runs before the wind at the lower right while long combers of green and white roll across the full width of the sheet. On the horizon lie a dark headland and a small white walled town on an island; high above, tiny against the blue-green sky, Bilibin drew the mosquito — Prince Guidon transformed — closing on the ship. The water is pure outline and flat colour, its foam broken into hooked white curls in the manner of the Japanese prints Bilibin admired. A red and olive ornamental band closes the image, with two lines of the poem beneath in his own red hand: He flew and buzzed, and overtook the ship at sea.

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.