Print depicting Carlotta Grisi and Jules Perrot in La Esmeralda. Lithograph coloured by hand after a drawing by J Bouvier, 1844.

In a setting of medieval and ecclesiastical buildings, two figures. On the right a dancer stands on pointe on her left leg, her right bent at the knee behind her, her left hand on hip, her right arm bent with her index finger in beckoning pose; she is looking down at a kneeling male figure on the left. He kneels in profile on his right knee, his hands raised in supplication. He wears white tights and a brown belted tunic, with white collar and white shirt visible at shoulders and elbows; on his long hair is a black fore and aft cap with low conical crown. She has severely dressed hair ending in two long thin plaits. Her very low off-the-shoulder blue bodice, trimmed with yellow braid, continues into short sleeves and is pointed centre front; it laces down the front over a white blouse. Around her waist is a red band, and the knee-length bell-shaped diaphanous skirt is overlaid at the hips with a lattice weighted with gold coins. On the ground is a tambourine.

Given by Dame Marie Rambert

Jules Perrot’s ballet Esmeralda was based on Victor Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris, published in 1831. Perrot danced the poet Gringoire and Carlotta Grisi was Esmeralda, the gipsy dancer. The print shows Perrot pleading with Esmeralda to marry him to save him from the mob.
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.

Print depicting Carlotta Grisi and Jules Perrot in La Esmeralda. Lithograph coloured by hand after a drawing by J Bouvier, 1844.

Jules Perrot's ballet Esmeralda was based on Victor Hugo's novel Notre Dame de Paris, published in 1831. It was premiered in London at Her Majesty's theatre in 1844. The ballet was highly praised for its realistic evocation of medieval Paris and the use of the corps de ballet as the Paris crowd. Grisi danced Esmeralda, the gipsy street dancer who performs to the rhythm of her tambourine, and the pose is evocative of her enticing charm. The coins weighing the lattice on her dress are characteristic of gipsy costume and North African belly dancing, indicating the origins of gipsies origins in Egypt.

The kneeling figure is Perrot playing the poet Gringoire, who Esmeralda marries out of pity to save him from the mob - hence his hands raised in supplication.

E.5023-1968