Lucile Grahn in Eoline, ou la Dryade. Lithograph coloured by hand by Edward Morton after S M Joy, 1845.

Above the sea, against a cloudy sky with full moon, a dancer is posed, her body set diagonally across the print from right to left. Her right leg and bare foot are stretch down, with the left leg raised to the back; her arms are held above her head and in her right hand she holds white, red and blue flowers with green foliage and from her left hand fall white, and red flowers with green foliage, forming groups of flowers floating into the distance. Her brown hair is severely dressed, with a band of foliage and flowers. Her eyes are downcast. Her white, diaphanous dress, has a knee length skirt, a bodice pleated up from the waist and short sleeves; around the waist is a narrow band. Trailing over her right shoulder, across her bodhy and onto the right side of the skirt, is a garland of leaves and tiny red flowers.
The print area has rounded corners; upper right hand corner of sheet rounded

Given by Dame Marie Rambert

Lucile Grahn made her London debut in March 1845 in Eoline or The Dryad, choreographed by Jules Perrot.
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.
That such a high quality print of Grahn in Eoline was produced soon after her London debut, is testimony to the immediate impact she made on audiences.

Lucile Grahn first appeared in London in 1845, in Eoline or The Dryad, choreographed by Jules Perrot. Eoline is the child of a Silesian prince and a wood nymph, who is loved by the mortal Edgar and Rubezahl, Prince of the Gnomes. The role gave Grahn the chance to show her acting skills in playing the two sides of the girl's nature - the mortal girl and the supernatural dryad. Several ballets of the 1840s, including Giselle, treated the dual nature of woman - the mortal and the untattainable spirit.
The print shows Eoline in dryad form. By moonlight, she 'flits through the wood, and floats on the lake, giving rise to strange reports and tales of the spirit haunted castle.'
The soft quality of the lithograph is perfectly matched to the ethereality of the subject.

E.5015-1968