Three merchants bow low before the throne of Tsar Saltan

Tsar Saltan sits crowned on a carved gilt throne with his arms folded and his long red-brown beard spread over them, while shipmen in green, blue and rust-coloured figured robes bow deep before him; the verse beside the plate names the weaver, the cook and old Babarikha, who sit close about the throne in kokoshniki and sunflower brocades. A small brown and white spaniel rests on a cushion at the foot of the steps, and the whole audience is set inside a low wooden chamber whose ceiling beams run straight back into the dark. Bilibin closed the page with three columns of Pushkin's verse and a running wave border in dark blue.

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.