Illustration by Adrian Allinson of a scene from Mikhail Fokine's 1909 ballet Cleopatre, in redesigned setting by Robert Delaunay, 1918, Diaghilev Ballets Russes.

Setting of pyramid in yellow, greens and ochre, dark blue and green background and huge orange moon in front of which are Egyptian columns in pink and purple. Cleopatra is reclining right of centre with attendants behind; beside her a male and female figure kneel in supplication to the High Priest at extreme right. Print coloured by hand.

Cyril W. Beaumont Bequest

The print depicts a scene in Mikhail Fokine's ballet Cleopatra, produced by the Diaghilev Ballets Russes in 1909, in the set designed Robert Delaunay in 1918. On the right, the High Priest holds the cup of poison, and before him kneels Amoun, who must drink the poison as the price of his night of love with Cleopatra; to left of Cleopatra, Amoun's lover, Ta-hor, pleads with Cleopatra. The print is an enlarged version of the frontispiece to Cleopatra, Impressions of the Russian Ballet 1918, Number One.

By the mid 1920s, there was an increasing interest in the Diaghilev Ballet and material relating to dance in general. Beaumont had already produced a series of booklets on individual Diaghilev Ballets under the series title Impressions of the Russian Ballet and a number of wooden cut-out Diaghilev dancers in their famous roles. He now decided to produce a series of hand coloured prints of typical scenes from the Diaghilev Ballet repertory. He kept no records of when he began publishing the prints nor how many were produced, although he reckoned about twenty, mostly the work of Adrian Allinson, Ethelbert White and Randolf Schwabe who had also worked on Impressions of the Russian Ballet booklets and the wooden figures, and Eileen Mayo.
In all these works, Beaumont strove to capture the exact moments of the ballet as well as artists' interpretations. It is likely that the design of each print followed the painstaking search for accuracy that had characterised the creation of the illustrations for Impressions of the Russian Ballet series, described in Bookseller at the Ballet, choosing the significant moment, watching the ballet night after night to check details of the poses and grouping (not easy when the stage was full of individual dancers and movement), going backstage to sketch scenery and borrow costumes.
Most of the hand-colouring for Impressions of the Russian Ballet booklets was the work of Beaumont and his wife, Alice, and it is possible that both were also involved in colouring the prints, although eventually other artists were employed on both projects.

Illustration showing Amoûn kneeling on one knee with arms outstretched to the reclining Cleopatre surrounded by the court with the High Priest on the right bringing the cup of poison.

S.499-2000