EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 20 © 2017 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

71 FACING PAGE TOP: Portrait of Ivan Bilibin, oil on canvas, 1901. Painting of Bilibin by artist Boris Kustodiev. FACING PAGE BOTTOM: Merchants, illustration for Pushkin’s fairy-tale ‘The Tsar of Saltan’, 1905. Bilibin’s relatively straightforward artwork, consisting only of the outlines for the figures and some flat colours, make for a very Art Nouveau piece, even if he was never considered part of that movement. Notice the precision of the perspective behind the characters, and the complex patterns of the garments the characters wear. RIGHT: Baba Yaga , illustration from ‘Vassilisa the Beautiful’, 1900. Baba Yaga was a ferocious looking witch from Slavic folklore. Vassilisa is from a Russian fairy-tale collected by Alexander Afanasyev in Russian Folk Tales . The tales were inspired by those written by the Brothers Grimm. Bilibin appeared pre-destined for a career in the arts.The son of a naval doctor, Yakov Ivanovich Bilibin, the boy grew up in a comfortable and nurturing middle-class environment. From childhood he was naturally orientated towards drawing, and at the age of nineteen he enrolled at the School of the Society for the Advancement of the Arts, and remained there until 1898. During the summer of that year, he travelled to Munich and worked in an art studio, an experience that he found stimulating and enlightening. On his return to Russia he determined to find a similar venue in which to hone his talents, and soon found an art studio in Saint Petersburg run by the master painter Ilya Repin, one of the most popular artists living in Russia at the time. Bilibin held Repin in reverence as an artist and teacher, and even wrote about him in his 1930 monograph ‘In Memory of Repin’. In 1899 he was commissioned to produce his first illustrations for the