Ivan Bilibin (Tarkhovka,1876 - St. Petersburg 1942)

The present watercolour is a colour illustration relating to The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish. Written by Alexander Pushkin in 1833, the Russian fairy-tale was first published in the literary magazine Biblioteka dlya chteniya in 1835. The story tells the tale of an old fisherman and his wife. Every day the fisherman would go out fishing while his wife would spin yarn. One day, however, the old man caught a golden fish in his net. The fish pleaded with the fisherman to let him go, promising him his every wish in return. The fisherman, though, released the golden fish back into the ocean without requesting any reward. On returning home and recounting the events to his wife she became infuriated and insisted that he return to ask the fish for a string of increasingly opulent gifts for her day after day.

In the foreground of the work the old fisherman, with his full wiry beard, clasps the golden fish gently in his hands. The fish’s head is turned upwards as it speaks to the man. Meanwhile, behind them, the fisherman’s wife in a patched up dress sits outside their ‘tumble-down hovel’, busily spinning away. The frown on her face is suggestive of her impending discontent.

In The Golden Fish, Ivan Bilibin creates a unique expressiveness through his emphasis of line and the use of silhouette. His work is derived from icon painting, as well as drawing on traditional Russian and Japanese woodblock prints.

Following the reopening of trade between Japan and the West, the dissipation and influence of Japanese woodblock prints, or Ukiyo-e, from the 1860s onwards was widespread, with Japonism in Impressionist Paris being well documented. In Russia, the trend for Ukiyo-e had also spread, with artists such as Alexander Benois, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva (1871-1955), Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (1875-1957) and Igor Grabar (1871-1960) all collecting the prints.

One of the most distinguished Russian collectors of Japanese woodblock prints was a Russian naval officer. Sergei Nikolaevich Kitaev (1864-1927) had built up a collection of Japanese prints and paintings, purchasing them each time his ship sailed into Japanese waters. What distinguished Kitaev’s collection from many others was that all his paintings and prints had been directly sourced in Japan and had been acquired either through agents, or directly from the artists themselves. The substantial and highly acclaimed collection, which was praised both in Japan and Europe, was entrusted to the Roumjantsev Museum in 1916 when Kitaev’s family left Russia, and was transferred to the Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow in 1924 (now the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts). It seems likely that such an important collection was known to Bilibin, particularly given that Kitaev had held an exhibition of his collection at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1896, while Bilibin was studying there.

In particular, Bilibin’s work recalls Katsushika Hokusai’s (1760-1849) series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1826-1833). Belonging to the landscape genre of Japanese prints, this particular series is represented in the Pushkin State Museum collection. Together with Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), Hokusai led the way in this particular genre. Rather than being a straightforward representation of a landscape, however, Hokusai’s interest in Mount Fuji stems from the Japanese legend of the bamboo cutter, in which Mount Fuji was alleged to be the source of eternal life. Whilst Hokusai does not directly narrate this particular story in his Mount Fuji series, he nevertheless draws on the power of folklore in his representations, thus drawing a comparative link with Bilibin’s own representation of Russian folklore in The Golden Fish.

On a stylistic level, the parallels between Hokusai and Bilibin are even more apparent; the simplicity of line, bold bands of colour, and areas of shading formed by the stylised lines of hatching in Bilibin’s work are clearly derived from those of Hokusai, as is the deep, inky blue wash which dominates the watercolour. The slightly raised viewpoint in Bilibin’s work, which allows us to peer into the fisherman’s boat and around much of the little island where his house is, also owes much to Hokusai, who frequently applied this particular technique to his work, enabling the viewer to have a widened bird’s eye perspective, as seen in his Tsukada Island in the Musashi Province.

There is, however, a distinctly Russian air to Bilibin’s oeuvre, no doubt a lingering product of the Slavic Revival in the latter part of the nineteenth century. During this period, the contrasting forces of internationalism and nationalism divided Russian art. Art was either influenced by larger European movements and styles, or, as in the case of Bilibin’s work, tried to express itself through a unique and distinctive Russian voice by referring to, or looking back at, earlier Slavic and Russian sources. This Romantic Nationalism was cemented in Bilibin’s work following several expeditions to northern Russia between 1902 and 1904, during which he gathered and photographed old wooden Russian architecture and folk art.

An expression of true Russian being, the beautiful and mystical timber constructions of the North, with their peasant farmhouses, homesteads, and magnificent churches, harked back to a bygone, old-world Russia and were a considerable influence on Bilibin. The largest preserved assemblage of these wooden buildings is in the Arkhangelsk Region in the Russian North, with the village of Malye Karely housing the open-air Wooden Architecture Museum. The fisherman’s old rickety hut in the present work is reminiscent of the traditional isba, or small wooden house, and his boat akin to the old boats of Northern Russia stored at Malye Karely.

It was during these early trips to the North that Bilibin also began to elaborate on the theme of Russian folklore. Bilibin later returned to the subject matter after 1931, when he once more began to illustrate Russian and Oriental folklore, as seen in the present work of 1933. Having lived outside Russia since the 1917 Revolution, one could interpret Bilibin’s works of this period as being an expression of a longing for his homeland.

A leading illustrator of his time, Bilibin is most renowned for establishing book illustrations as an independent art form. For Bilibin, the page was an expressive entity, a composite of the text and its presentation, and his work for children’s books, journals and magazines is particularly well known. Bilibin considered illustration to be integral to the artistic value of a book and was thus considered to be one of the first artists in Russia to view illustration per se as an art form. An artist, illustrator, teacher, stage and costume designer, who worked on the designs for opera productions of The Golden Cockerel, Askold’s Grave, Ruslan and Ludmila and Sadko, amongst others, Bilibin drew his influences from Russian folklore, the old wooden architecture of the Russian North, as well as Art Nouveau and traditional Japanese prints. The combination of Romantic Nationalism and modern design within his work made his illustrations unique.

Born in the small town of Tarkhovka near St. Petersburg, the son of a naval doctor, Bilibin studied both art and law simultaneously from 1895 to 1900. It was however art that took the lead in his life, and Bilibin studied under Ilya Repin (1844-1930).

In 1899, Bilibin produced a series of watercolours which were inspired by his visit to an exhibition of old Russian folklore and opera. Gaining the attention of the Department for the Production of State Documents, Bilibin was commissioned to produce a set of illustrated Russian fairy-tales, which included Maria Morevna, The Frog Princess, The Firebird, The Grey Wolf and Vasilisa the Beautiful.

His style matured during several expeditions to Northern Russia between 1902 and 1904, during which he gathered and photographed folk art, handicraft items and traditional wooden buildings, and subsequently documented his findings in 1904 in Folk Arts of the Russian North. Bilibin taught graphic art from 1907 to 1917 at the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, and was later a lecturer at the Soviet Academy of Arts.

Following the Revolution in 1917, Bilibin left Russia for Egypt, where he lived for five years. In 1929, he moved to Paris, and his costume and stage designs, and fairy-tale illustrations marked the heyday of his career in emigration. Illustrated fairy tales were extremely popular in France, with Alexander Benois (1870-1960) once describing them as ‘the nicest present we can offer our children.’¹ Due to their high quality and his apolitical interpretation of a magical Russian world, Bilibin’s illustrations remained popular throughout Russian history. In 1936, he finally returned to St. Petersburg, where he died during the German blockade of 1942.

¹ A. Benois, More Books by Bilibin, 1934.