A skull on a stick burns green at the edge of the witch's yard

Vasilisa stands at the edge of the clearing holding a skull on a stick, its eye sockets burning yellow-green and throwing thin rays out into the dark. Behind her the stakes of Baba Yaga's fence carry more skulls, a scaled bird's leg shows beneath the hut, and one small window is lit rose-pink through the firs. She wears a long cream shift with a red and ochre embroidered hem, coral bead necklaces and a heavy fair plait. The whole wood is worked in olive and brown, so the skull's glow is the only bright thing in the plate; the border is a run of toadstools in pink, cream and coral.

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.