The tsar rides to war, and the pattern of the court closes behind

The tsar stands at the right in a yellow caftan sown with pink and blue flower sprigs, a long copper beard falling to his waist, his crown worked in gold; a guard in red stands at his shoulder. Along the left a group of women in kokoshniki and figured brocades has gathered, one with her hand raised to her cheek. Bilibin fills the sheet edge to edge with pattern — lattice, sunflower and diamond weaves, tall grey hats, a horse in red harness — and lets a brown and white spaniel and a red rooster wander through the foreground. A blue and olive band runs beneath, with two lines of the poem in his red hand: Tsar Saltan, taking leave of his wife and mounting his good steed, bade her keep herself well for love of him.

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.