Fanny Cerrito in La Sylphide. Lithograph coloured by hand by Dickinson after a drawing by J Deffett Francis, 1846.

In the centre against a shaded ground with upper part tinted blue, a dancer jumps from her right to left, her body slightly angled, her head inclined to her right, her eyes looking at the viewer. Her left foot is stretched and about to land, while her right foot is stretched behind, visible under the hem of the skirt. Her arms are held down in front and her right fingers, with rings on third and fourth fingers, are held in the left hand. Her hair is centrally parted and looped back over the ears. Around her neck is a pearl necklace and around her proper right upper arm is a double pearl band. The off-the-shoulder white fitted bodice finishes in a low point over the hips; the front is trimmed with a central flower posy and, where the bodice meets the swathes around the upper arm, are a group of drop pearls; from the back emerge double wings. The diaphanous bell-shaped skirt reaches to below the knee. Her shoes and ribbons are tinted blue.
The print area is cut across on upper corners.

Given by Dame Marie Rambert

In performing the role of the Sylph in 1841, Fanny Cerrito was inviting comparison with Marie Taglioni, greatest ballerina of the 19th century, for whom La Sylphide had been created. But Cerrito's hold over the London public was so great that she felt she could challenge the older ballerina in her greatest role.
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.

Attribution note: The word 'Proof'printed on the lithograph does not indicate a test copy made for revisions. Because lithography allowed such large runs of a print, it was argued that they were of no worth as an art-print, unlike engravings, which had much smaller print runs. Printing early pulls in a run with 'Proof' was a way of making them more attactive to print collectors, although they have no extra merit over any other pull in the run.

The supernatural was a popular theme in ballet in the 1840s. It was a reflection of the Romantic era, which, partly in reaction to the rapid industrialization of England, sought imaginative escape to realms of fancy or some distant foreign locations. The Sylph, as immortalised in the ballet La Sylphide, was a symbol of man's desire to escape from the prosaic world; she was also an image of the perfect woman, chaste, demure and unattainable.

The original costume for the Sylph was an adaptation of fashionable dress of the early 1830s, when the ballet was created. It had cap sleeves, bell skirt and low neck. The ballet was so successful that this dress evolved into a 'uniform' for the dancer and if the popular view of a ballerina is a dancer standing on tiptoe, with severely parted hair and bell-shaped skirt and very low neckline, it is due to this ballet.

E.4993-1968