A horse of pure flame carries the sunrise through the birches

The Red Horseman — the rising sun — bursts through the birch wood on a flame-red horse, rider and mount alike in scarlet, a round shield behind his shoulder and the reins gathered in one hand. Pink and white flowers are scattered across the grass beneath. Bilibin frames the illustration with thistles above and clover below on a rose ground, and the sheet is reproduced as he laid the page out: the tale set in his own lettering down the right-hand column and across the foot, inside a printed border of small sailing ships and a village skyline. Signed И.Б. and dated 1900.

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.