Print by Ethelbert White of Bova Korolevitch's freeing the Swan Princess from the dragon from Leonide Massine's ballet Children's Tales (Contes Russes), Diaghilev Ballets Russes, 1917

Against a bright orange backdrop with a stylized sun, to the left a stylized castle in pale pink and crimson, with a flight of pink steps with stylized foliage design, to the right, stylized foliage flowers in green blue and blue and stylized 'stepped' rocks highlighted yellow. From behind the steps emerges a three-headed pale blue-green dragon and on the steps stands a female figure wearing a sarafan decorated blue and yellow and a kokoshnik. In front of the dragon stands a horse. Centre stage, scimitar and shield raised, is a male figure wearing Russian dress in green and yellow with orange boots; to the right a line of women wearing decorated sarafans and kokoshniks in various colours. Print coloured by hand signed Ethelbert White.
The image is framed by a multiple line border one band of which is coloured red, one yellow and one blue.

Cyril W. Beaumont Bequest

The print depicts a scene in Leonide Massine's ballet Children's Tales (Contes Russes), based on various popular Russian folk tales, designed by Mikhail Larionov, music by Liadoff, first produced by Diaghilev Ballets Russes in 1917 (subsequently revised). The scene shows Bova Korolevitch, a kind of Russian Sir Galahad, preparing to fight the dragon and free the Swan-Princess from his enchantments, watched by the Princess' sisters.
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. Possibly 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 - although some prints appear to be 'composite' rather than specific tableaux.
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.

S.480-2000