Contes populaires russes [Russian Folk Tales].

Limited edition of Pushkin's tales with wonderful hand-coloured illustrations.

Jean Lébédeff was born in a small town near Nizhniy Novgorod in 1884 to a family of grain merchants. Aged 22 he became a navigator and shortly afterwards captain of a merchant ship on the Volga. He was abhorred by the deplorable behaviour of the Tsar's guards and banished them from his vessel. Seeing as he didn't have the authority to relieve them from duty, he fled to France in order to escape imprisonment.
The experience left an indelible mark on Lébédeff and he remained fervently anti-imperialist his whole life, befriending Kropotkin in exile and hiding anarchists and Jews during WWII.

In 1909 he settled in Paris and studied at the Beaux-Arts, where his love affair with woodcut engraving was born. His artistic career was incredibly fruitful and his circle of friends included some of the most notable creative figures of the era such as Modigliani, Picabia, Cendrars, Soutine and Matisse. Despite acquiring his education in France his style of illustration is much akin to Russian lubok prints. Pushkin's fairy tales have received numerous different interpretations and this particular rendition is particularly charming, no doubt influencing later émigré artists such as Goncharova.