The rider in white passes, and the forest begins to grow light

Vasilisa walks the forest path with a staff and turns her head as a rider in white armour on a white horse passes among the firs — the White Horseman, who brings the daybreak. Beyond the trunks the sky is banded pink and pale grey over water, with the sun not yet up. She wears a cream shift with red embroidery at the sleeve and hem over a blue-grey skirt, her hair loose down her back. Bilibin flattens the wood into olive, brown and birch-white and frames it with a border of black birds perched on stylised firs, with two pale lizards on the wood-grain panel above. Signed 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.