Costume design by Oliver Messel for the Fairy of the Songbirds in the Prologue of Marius Petipa's ballet The Sleeping Beauty, Sadler's Wells (now Royal) Ballet at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 1946 or a later revival.

Costume design by Oliver Messel for the Fairy of the Songbirds in the ballet The Sleeping Beauty. Full length figure of a dancer in a brown and yellow tutu, decorated with small birds on the shoulders, bodice and skirt.

Acquired with the support of the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Art Fund and the Friends of the V&A

Oliver Messel designed The Sleeping Beauty, Marius Petipa and Tchaikovsky's masterpiece, for the Sadler's Wells (now Royal) Ballet. It was the production with which the company reopened the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1946, after the theatre's wartime use as a dance hall. The production was in the repertory for nearly 25 years. Messel revised the designs several times, with major revisions in 1952 and 1960, and he reworked them again when the production was mounted in 1959 for the Royal Ballet Touring Company.

Lord Snowdon, Oliver Messel's nephew, inherited Messel's theatre designs and other designs and artefacts. The designs were briefly stored in a disused chapel in Kensington Palace before being housed at the V&A from 1981 on indefinite loan. The V&A Theatre Museum purchased the Oliver Messel collection from Lord Snowdon in 2005.

Historical significance: This production of The Sleeping Beauty established itself as the Sadler's Wells/Royal Ballet's signature work, associated with many key events in the company's history. These include its first sensational appearance in New York in 1949, which established the company's international reputation, and in Russia in 1961 when The Sleeping Beauty was taken back to its place of birth in St Petersburg. Messel's designs were a significant part of the ballet's success.

This may be a design for a later revival of the production.

Oliver Messel (1904-1978) was Britain's leading theatre designer throughout the 1930s, '40s and '50s, mastering every aspect of entertainment - ballet, drama, film, musical, opera and revue - as well as working in interior decoration and textile design. His lavish, painterly and romantic concepts were perfectly in tune with the times and earned him an international reputation. By 1960, however, that style was becoming unfashionable, and Messel gradually abandoned theatre and built a new career designing luxury homes in the Caribbean.

The Sleeping Beauty, designed for the Sadler's Wells (now Royal) Ballet in 1946, is Messel's most enduring production. The fairy costumes and fantasy elements were anchored in a 'real' world, inspired by the soaring architectural fantasies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Costumes were based upon mid-late 17th-century fashions, mixing English, Spanish and French period styles.

The Fairy of the Songbirds bestows the gift of eloquence on Princess Aurora at her christening.

S.819-2011