The knights come out of the sea in a single unbroken rank

The knights come up out of the sea in a single unbroken rank — white scale mail studded with gold, tall silver helmets, red sleeves and breeches, and a hedge of pink-shafted spears held at exactly the same angle right across the sheet. At the right end walks their leader, an older man with a long white beard: Chernomor. Behind them the water is flat green, the far shore black, and above it a strip of night carries four coloured stars; at the left a pale fortress wall stands on rock above a shingle spit. It is one of Bilibin's boldest designs, a single repeated figure used as pure pattern. Three columns of Pushkin's verse and a dark blue wave border complete the page.

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.