A costume ball with figures including Chinese figures, a peg-legged fiddler, and Irish bard, a pantomime clown and a hairdresser. Lithograph, first quarter 19th century

A hall with Corinthian columns supporting a classical frieze, swags of garlands behind the columns, chandeliers hanging from the frieze and, to either side, a lamp supported on a post rising from a pineapple on a plinth. Across the centre of the print is an assembly of people in fancy dress including men in caped coats, tricorne hats and half-masks, Chinese figures, a peg-legged fiddler with a girl begging with a hat in her hand, a woman offering cards to a man, an Irish bard playing a harp, a clothes dealer wearing two hats and showing a coat to a monk, various figures in servant dress, clerical and military costume, a pantomime clown and a hairdresser with a comb in his wig wielding scissors at a man in Asian dress.

Given by Dame Marie Rambert

The print is the same lay-out, although with different figures, as E.4976-1968, E.4977-1968, and E.4978-1968. E.4974-1968 showing the exterior of a building, is in the same style and is presumably part of the same group. E.4975-1968 is similar in size and style but the frieze is different and there are doors to the back and either side plus the introduction of figures in the doorway.
The print is part of the collection of dance prints amassed by Marie Rambert and her husband, Ashley Dukes in the first half of the 20th century. Eventually numbering 145 items, some of which had belonged to the ballerina Anna Pavlova, it was one of the first and most important specialist collections in private hands.
Rambert bought the first print as a wedding present but could not bear to give it away. As the collection grew, it was displayed in the bar of the Mercury Theatre, the headquarters of Ballet Rambert, but in 1968, Rambert gave the collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum; seven duplicates were returned to Rambert, but these are catalogued in Ivor Guest's A Gallery of Romantic Ballet, which was published before the collection came to the V&A. Although often referred to as a collection of Romantic Ballet prints, there are also important engravings of 17th and 18th century performers, as well as lithographs from the later 19th century, by which time the great days of the ballet in London and Paris were over.

Historical significance: One of a series of six untitled prints in the Rambert-Dukes collection relating to costume balls in public assembly rooms, ca. 1820.

This print shows a fashionable assembly room of the 18th and 19th centuries, a public building where balls, meetings, gambling and private functions were held. Some, like Almaks in London charged a subscription fee which entitled members to a weekly ball with supper during the London season. The fees might be low, but prospective members often had to run the gauntlet of a formidable committee of women who could make or break someone's social standing, irrespective of rank or money; the Duke of Wellington was once turned away because he was seven minutes late and wearing trousers instead of breeches.
Not all Assembly Rooms and pleasure gardens were so demanding about their clientele. Many were popular meeting places where people met, often masked or in fancy dress, to dance, gamble, eat and make generally merry. Many acquired a disreputable reputation and by the mid-19th century, their heyday was over.

E.4979-1968