Exterior of a public assembly building. Lithograph first quarter 19th century.

Exterior of a building with stone walls with a central portico, supported by four Corinthian columns supporting a classical frieze. Under the portico is a Venetian window and two street lamps; to either side of the portico is a high vertical window. From the columns, a flight of steps leads to the street, flanked by statues inspired by classical subjects.

Given by Dame Marie Rambert

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.

Historical significance: One of a series of six untitled prints in the Rambert-Dukes collection relating to costume balls in public assembly rooms, ca. 1820.

This print is the first in a series depicting a costume ball about 1820. It shows the exterior of a fashionable assembly room of the 18th and 19th centuries, a public building where balls, meetings, gambling and private functions were held. Some, like Almaks in London charged a subscription fee which entitled members to a weekly ball with supper during the London season. The fees might be low, but prospective members often had to run the gauntlet of a formidable committee of women who could make or break someone's social standing, irrespective of rank or money; the Duke of Wellington was once turned away because he was seven minutes late and wearing trousers instead of breeches.

E.4974-1968