Madame Céleste as the Arab Boy in Victoire!. Lithograph coloured by hand after a sketch by William Drummond, 1838.

Lithograph coloured by hand of Madame Céleste as the Arab Boy in Victoire!. The lithograph features Madame Céleste dressed in a white dress with blue stripes and is playing a musical instrument on top of a mountain.

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.

In the days before photography, such lithographs were expensive souvenirs, bought by the individual dancer's admirers.

Céleste was an extremely popular French-born dancer and actress, a great favourite with audiences in London and New York. Victoire! a military drama performed at the Adelphi theatre in 1837, gave her every chance to shine in no less than three parts - Victoire (with a 'desperate combat'), Henri, St. Almo (A French Spy) and Hamet (a dumb Arab Boy).
The print shows the opening scene, set in a French Army camp with a distant view of Constantina, the Spanish town in the Sierra Morena mountains above Seville. The role of the dumb Arab Boy was written specially to show the expressiveness of Céleste's dancing and mime.

E.4985-1968