Sarah Jane Woolgar as Duke Albert in The Phantom Dancers. Lithograph coloured by hand by D Fabronius after a drawing by T H Wilson, 1847.

Beneath a vine overlooking a lake and mountains, stands a woman in man's dress, her body half turned to her right, weight on her right leg and left turned out; her left arm is flexed, the hand on front hip, and her right bent upwards with index finger raised; her head is turned to look at the viewer. On her head is a cream round crowned hat with a red and blue rosette, with a blue tassel hanging to the left. She wears a white shirt with a long blue jacket, open down the sleeves and held with red bows, with bold epaulettes, edges and 'frogging' in pink and red bows on the pocket flaps. Her voluminous knee-length breeches are decorated down either side with a blue and pink strip trimmed with red bows. Her stockings are white with, from knee to ankle, blue and white ribbons wound around the leg; her heelless black slippers have red and 'gold' buckles.

Given by Dame Marie Rambert

The image shows Sarah Jane Woolgar as Duke Albert in The Phantom Dancers, a burlesque of the ballet Giselle by Charles Selby performed at the Adelphi Theatre, London, on 2 November 1846. The music was arranged by Alfred Mellon, who married Sarah Jane Woolgar.
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.

The large souvenir prints of the Romantic ballet and theatre, issued in the 1830s and 1840s, are among the most evocative performance images in the 19th century. The lithographs produced in London are notable for capturing the personality and style of individual performers in a theatrical setting. They are a fitting tribute to a rich theatrical periods.
In the days before photography, such lithographs were expensive souvenirs, bought by the individual performer's admirers.

A girl playing a male role in the 1840s indicates that the subject is a burlesque. The Phantom Dancers was a spoof on the popular ballet Giselle, in which an innocent peasant girl kills herself on finding that her lover is an aristocrat and betrothed to someone else; she becomes a Wili, spirits of jilted girls who wreak revenge on men.
What had been intended as funny in The Phantom Dancers became fact. The success and idolisation of the ballerina in the 1840s diminished the role of the male dancer in European ballet. In late 19th century Paris and London men's roles were danced by comely young girls, like principal boys in pantomime.

E.5067-1968