Marie Taglioni in Flore et Zéphire. Lithograph coloured by hand by R J Lane after a drawing by A E Chalon. Published in London by J. Dickinson in June 1831.

Against a wooded setting to the left and across the lower half of the print, a dancer stands with her body slightly turned to her right, her right hand held out at shoulder height and her left bent upwards to her left shoulder; her head is turned with the eyes looking out over her left shoulder. She stands on the tip of her right foot, her left leg stretched out behind. Her hair is dressed fully to the sides with a flower coronet on the crown, some centres highlighted yellow. Her dress has a fitted bodice, with loosely pleated around the neck, with wide cap sleeves and a diaphanous cross-over knee length skirt; fixed at the back are wings tinted blue with peacock eyes; on her right shoulder at the waist and on the skirt are small bunches of flowers and around her neck, wrists and upper arms are rows of pearls.

Given by Dame Marie Rambert

Flore et Zéphire was originally choreographed by Charles Didelot in 1796. It was revived for Marie Taglioni at the King's Theatre in London in 1830.
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.

Marie Taglioni was the greatest ballerina of the 19th century, famous for her portrayal of ethereal, inhuman spirits. At a time when many men idealised women, her characters symbolised ideal womanhood - feminine, spiritual, ethereal and unattainable.

Taglioni is dancing on pointe (on the tips of her toes). This is first recorded as an acrobatic trick in the 1820s; that it became an essential part of the ballerina's technique was mainly due to Taglioni and the choreography created for her by her father, which used it expressively to suggest character and mood.

If the dress were longer, Taglioni would be in the height of fashion; the fitted bodice, full sleeves, conical skirt and elaborate hairstyle are typical fashionable wear of the early 1830s. Even her shoes are little more than evening slippers of the period. As pointe shoes, they 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 later in the 19th century.

E.5055-1968