Adeline Plunkett. Lithograph coloured by hand R J Lane after an oil painting by Richard Buckner, 1854.

The dancer stands facing the viewer, weight on her right foot, the left crossed over in front; her right arm leans on a waist-high plinth and her left hand is hidden in the fabric of her skirt. Her hair is severely dressed with a plait across the crown, and decorated with tiny flowers and foliage down either side of the head. She wears a knee-length dress, the white low-cut bodice cut onto the hips and finishing centre front in a low, sharply angled point; the stomacher is decorated with horizontal bands of white ribbon and lines of vertical 'gold' 'dashes?'; over the bodice is a brief, short-sleeved pink bolero, decorated with white and 'gold' braids, the sleeves finished with a white frill. The bell-shaped skirt has a row of bold 'gold' bows at thigh height and the lower skirt is coloured to suggest 'frou-frou'. Around her right arm, behind the body and falling down the left side of her skirt onto the floor, is a diaphanous white stole. On the floor is a posy of flowers. The top corners of the print are cut across

Given by Dame Marie Rambert

Adeline Plunkett was born in Belgium and danced in London and Paris in the 1840s and 1850s. The painting on which this print is based is in the Birmingham Art Gallery;according to George Chaffee, The Romantic Ballet in London (Dance Index September-December 1943) it shows her in her most famous dance, La Manola.
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.

In the 19th century ballet, a 'national' costume was an adaptation of a typical ballet dress (low neck, pointed fitted bodice and bell-shaped, knee-length skirt), with the addition of one or two features characteristic of the relevant country. So as a Spanish dancer Plunkett wears a typical 19th century ballet dress with hints of Spanish costume in the tiny bolero jacket and hair dressing. The painting may record her in her famous dance La Manola.
Following the success of Fanny Elssler's cachucha, Spanish dance became extremely popular with theatre audiences and many ballerinas evolved their own solos and pas de deux based around Spanish dance steps; versions of La Manola were danced by Fanny Cerrito and Adelina Plunkett. One critic declared that Plunkett, born in Belgium, and Elssler were 'the most authentic Andalusians' - a comment that was received with incredulity by native Spanish dancers.

E.5037-1968