Arthur Saint-Léon in La Esmeralda, scene 3. Lithograph coloured by hand after a drawing by J Brandard, ca. 1845.

A garden pavilion hung with floral garlands and a fountain in the background. In the centre a male dancer jumps in the air, his left leg to the front and his right leg bent behind; his right arm is bent above his head and in his outstretched left hand he holds a rose; his head is inclined to his left. He wears a ruby red soft cap with a pink feather and a skirted dark blue jacket with square neck, trimmed at the neck and down the front with yellow and with small yellow banded oversleeves at the shoulder. Behind, to his left, stands a girl in a ballet dress with a blue bodice, holding a tambourine. To the sides and back stand girls wearing knee-length white ballet dresses trimmed with flowers. The upper edge of the print area is domed and the lower corners cut across.

Given by Dame Marie Rambert

The lithograph shows Arthur Saint-Léon in Jules Perrot's ballet Esmeralda, performed at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1844. The plot was based on Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris.
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.

This mid-19th century lithograph is unusual in being one of the rare prints at this period showing a man alone. Although men had not yet been reduced to completely subservient role, the triumph of the ballerina in the first half of the century had turned the spotlight away from the male dancer who now, as far as the dancing was concerned, was there to lift, support and worship. Saint-Léon, however, was an exception. Audiences appreciated his masculine style and manner and astonished them with his jumps and steps of elevation. He is the most amazing, the most extraordinary, the most aerial dancer that has ever been seen' said one critic. 'He reaches prodigious heights, hovers and balances himself in space … I would call him a living aerostat were I not afraid of over-flattering balloons.'

E.5043-1968