Sketchbook inspired by the ballet Los Caprichos starring Ana Nevada, Juanita Garcia and Roland Petit, performed by Roland Petit's Company Les Ballets des Champs-Elysées, which performed a four-week season at the Adelphi Theatre from 9th April 1946. By Albert Houthuesen (1903-1979), May 1946.

Sketchbook of pen, pencil and watercolour studies made at the Adelphi Theatre' backstage and from memory, inspired by a season of French ballet by Roland Petit's company, the Ballets de Champs Elysées, which Albert Houthuesen saw at the Adelphi Theatre in April 1946, the cover swirled with paint and inscribed in paint 'Adelphi Theatre 1946'. The fly leaf in inscribed 'Chatham Rd. S.E.17. Houthuesen'

Given by Mrs. Catherine Houthuesen

Albert Houthuesen wrote about this sketchbook: 'I was avid to go to the theatre. The two ballet companies which really interested me were Covent Garden and the Ballet of the Champs-Elysées at the Adelphi. At that time I went more to the Adelphi. It was small and more intimate and the company was small and very exciting. The ballets were various, very charming and full of life. They all fell under certain headings - they have to, like paintings. They were about falling in love or being rejected or dying or a festival. For me, they gave a general impression of what life is about with the rather Spanish accent governing the idea.

There was a dancer called Juanita Garcia, a dwarf figure who hammered it out with tremendous power. And there was Ana Nevada. She was a remarkable looking girl and a beautiful dancer. In this particular thing 'Los Caprichos' I have never heard castanets speak as she made them speak. She was far and away the best of that company.

I remember saying to Nevada 'Let me see how you hold with those index fingers straight as a die. I watched that many times.

For viewing the ballet as an entirety, the stalls are hopeless. For a painter it's very interesting because you get the tremendous immediacy of the living figures, but for the illusion - the whole thing in its entirety - you should sit in the Dress Circle.'

Drawn at the Adelphi Theatre

This sketchbook contains pen, pencil and watercolour studies drawn by Houthuesen both backstage and from memory, of the one-act ballet Los Caprichos in which a young girl falls in love with a Toreador. Inspired by the visions of Goya, the Toreador was danced by Roland Petit, and the ballet was choreographed by Ana Nevada, who played The Young Girl, and Juanito Garcia, who danced one of the Nightmare Figures. It was one of the thirteen ballets presented in April 1946 at London's Adelphi Theatre in a four-week season of French ballet by the Ballets de Champs Elysées, Roland Petit's company which was formed in 1945. The season of French ballet at the Adelphi Theatre was a very exciting event and the first time since war was declared in 1939 that any foreign ballet company had performed in London.

Albert Houthuesen (1903-1979) was born in Amsterdam but came to London with his mother in 1912 after the death of his father. After attending the Royal College of Art, he became a teacher and subsequently a full-time artist. His work covered a wide range of subjects and mediums but he especially loved the theatre, dance and clowns.

S.425:1-1980