Gold scrollwork closes around a tale of a tsar and the sea

Bilibin's cover for the 1905 Tale of Tsar Saltan: a field of gold and tan paisley scrollwork on near-black, each spiral set with a small teal rosette, closing around a lobed cartouche of plain gold outlined in green. Inside it the title is drawn in his own lettering after the old Russian book hands — СКАЗКА О ЦАРѢ САЛТАНѢ — above a dedication that reads I dedicate this work to the Russian composer N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, signed and dated 1905. Rimsky-Korsakov's opera on the same tale had had its premiere five years earlier. This is ornament rather than illustration, and it shows how completely Bilibin had absorbed the vocabulary of seventeenth-century Russian manuscript borders.

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.