Fanny Elssler dancing the Cracovienne from The Gipsy. Lithograph coloured by hand after a drawing by J Bouvier, 1839.

Against a background of Edinburgh Castle and tenement houses, a dancer stands on her right leg, her left leg stretched to the side; her body is facing the viewer, her forso and head slightly tilted, with her right arm raised over her head and her left on her hip. She wears a high crowned black hat with a decorative mount with a feather at the front; to the back are long, thin, plaits. Her high-necked, long-sleeved, fitted jacket is tinted palest pink and is buttoned down the front; the stand-up collar is elaborately decorated and the fronts are decorated with dense rows of frogging; around the waist is a decorated 'gold' belt. The calf-length, bell-shaped blue skirt is tinted to suggest moiré silk. On her feet are fitted beige ankle boots with blue flashes on the heel, laced on the inner side. On ground a flower spray and rose.

Given by Dame Marie Rambert

The print shows Fanny Elssler dancing the Cracovienne in Joseph Mazilier's ballet The Gipsy. The ballet was produced in Paris in January 1839 and Elssler danced it in London in July 1839. The print commemorates her London performances.
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 over 130 items, 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. Although it is often referred to as the Rambert-Dukes collection of Romantic Ballet prints, it includes 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, issued in the 1830s and 1840s, are among the most evocative images of dance in the 19th century. Lithography, with its soft quality, enhanced by the delicate yet rich hand-colouring, was ideally suited to the subject - the ballerinas who dominated ballet in the mid-century and the romanticised settings in which they performed; style and subject were perfectly matched. 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 one of ballet's richest periods.
Before the development of colour printing, the basic black and white prints were hand coloured. There is often considerable variation from one print to another, both in colour and quality of the work. The most important souvenir prints, such as this one, would only have been sent out to the best colourists, and it is often very difficult to tell the best hand colouring from early colour printing. In the days before photography, such lithographs were expensive souvenirs, bought by the individual dancer's admirers.

Fanny Elssler was one of the greatest dancers of the Romantic ballet and rival to Marie Taglioni, but where Taglioni was ethereal and spiritual, Elssler was more human and sexy. In the print, she is wearing a female adaptation of military costume, marking her out as a vivandière, one of the women accompanying armies on campaign, selling them liquor and supplies. She is dancing the Cracovienne, a Polish dance, in front of Edinburgh castle - mixing two locations which held 'romantic' associations for her time, Scotland with the dances of Eastern Europe. On her heels are little spurs, which provided a metallic click in the rhythm of the dance, rather like heel castanets which, according to reports of the time, 'give the dance a quality of joyous vivacity which is quite irresistible.'
When the French critic, Théophile Gautier tried to describe Elssler dancing the Cracovienne, he found it difficult to translate into words a fundamentally visual experience and was reduced to: 'it is rhythmic precision mingled with a charming ease, a muscular and bounding agility which cannot be imagined.' The dance was encored every evening.

E.5001-1968