Flora Fabbri as Mazourka in The Devil to Pay. Lithograph coloured by hand by J Brandard after a drawing by J W Child, 1846.

A dancer stands on pointe, her other leg at 90 degrees and bent in attitude. Her body faces half to her right and her arms are raised in front, with her head turned back to her left. Her severely dressed hair is tied back into red ribbons, with the tails streaming out over her left shoulder. Around her neck is a long black ribbon, caught held by an oval brooch. Her short-sleeved, very low, wide-necked black bodice finishes in a point centre front; around the shoulders is a white band crossed with fine red ribbons and edged with lace; a similar band trims the sleeves; the bodice is laced across the front. Over her diaphanous white calf-length skirt is a white lace-edged apron decorated with vertical red ribbons. On the right is a door and window of a cottage with a bench outside; in the background are hills and a lake. On the ground are a posy and a laurel wreath

Given by Dame Marie Rambert

The lithograph shows Flora Fabbri as Mazourka in Joseph Mazilier's ballet The Devil to Pay. As Le Diable à quatre, the ballet was premiered in Paris in August 1845, and, retitled The Devil to Pay, was first seen in London with Fabbri in the leading role at Drury Lane in 1845.
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, 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.

Drawn by J W Child

The Devil to Pay (Le Diable à quatre) was the ballet chosen for Flora Fabbri's London debut in 1845. The print records her as the peasant Mazourka dancing outside the cottage she shares with her basketmaker husband, with the Polish countryside in the background. She was an instantaneous success and the audience were 'quite frantic in their enthusiasm.' The posy and wreath on the ground are symbols of the tributes thrown by the audience at the end of a performance.
Fabbri is dancing on pointe (on the tips of her toes). This is first recorded as an acrobatic trick in the 1820s, but by the early 1830s it was an essential part of the ballerina's technique and choreographers were using it expressively to suggest character and mood. The shoes gave little support, the only stiffening being a little darning at the back of the toes; the modern pointe shoe, with its flat, blocked toe, did not develop until much later in the 19th century.

E.5006-1968