Carlotta Grisi in Giselle (L'Album de l'Opéra, 2nd series, No. 4). Tinted lithograph after a drawing by Challamel, 1841

A hilly landscape with a lake in middle distance with trees to the right below which are flowers; to the left, amid ivy and ferns, a cross draped with the name "GISELLE".
Above floats a dancer, positioned on a slight diagonal moving towards the left. Her legs are stretched with feet pointed, her left arm is held outwards and her right arm is bent with her index finger pointing to her forehead. On her head she wears a band of flowers with a star at the centre. Her white off-the-shoulder dress has short sleeves and tight fitting bodice. The diaphanous skirt is in two layers, a knee-length underskirt and a shorter overskirt trimmed with two posies of flowers.

Given by Dame Marie Rambert

Giselle the most famous ballet of the Romantic ballet, was devised by the French writer, Théophile Gautier, for Carlotta Grisi, whom he admired inordinately, likening her to ‘a tea-rose about to bloom.’ She first danced the ballet in Paris in 1841 and in London in 1842.
The lithograph is No 4 of the second series of L’Album de l’Opéra, published in 1844. Of the twenty-four plates, eight recorded ballet dancers.
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.

Giselle is one of the oldest ballets to survive into the present century. First performed in 1841, it told of the innocent girl, wooed by Duke Albrecht in disguise. When his true identity is revealed and his engagement to an aristocrat, Giselle goes mad and kills herself. In the second act, she becomes a Wili, the spirit of a girl who dies having been jilted by her lover but saves the repentant Albrecht from the vengeful spirits. The dancer's gesture is uncertain. She may be using the traditional mime gesture for 'remember' or, less likely, it might be a reference to her madness. The blue tint is a reference to the night, when the Wilis rise from their graves to take their revenge on any man who crosses their path.

E.5018-1968