Original hand-coloured wood engraving of a scene from the ballet "Contes Russes"

A colorful illustration of one of the scenes of the 1917 Ballets Russes production of Leonide Massine’s Children's Tales ("Contes Russes") with a set by Larionov. Print, fully colored by hand in gouache, 36.5 x 33 cm. Some markings to border, the image itself fine.


Based on various popular Russian folk tales, the ballet was designed by Mikhail Larionov, with music by Liadoff,and was first produced by Diaghilev Ballets Russes in 1917 (subsequently revised). By the mid 1920s, there was an increasing interest in the Diaghilev Ballet and material relating to dance in general and the British ballet historian Cyril Beaumont (1891-1976) commissioned artists to execute a number of prints that would faithfully record performances by the Ballets Russes in London. Beaumont had already produced a series of booklets on individual Diaghilev Ballets under the series title Impressions of the Russian Ballet and a number of wooden cut-out Diaghilev dancers in their famous roles. For the present series of hand coloured prints of typical scenes from the Diaghilev Ballet repertory, he kept no records of when he began publishing the prints nor how many were produced, although he reckoned about twenty, mostly the work of Adrian Allinson, Ethelbert White and Randolf Schwabe who had also worked on Impressions of the Russian Ballet booklets and the wooden figures, and Eileen Mayo.


In all these works, Beaumont strove to capture the exact moments of the ballet as well as artists' interpretations. Possibly the design of each print followed the painstaking search for accuracy that had characterised the creation of the illustrations for Impressions of the Russian Ballet series, described in Bookseller at the Ballet - choosing the significant moment, watching the ballet night after night to check details of the poses and grouping (not easy when the stage was full of individual dancers and movement), going backstage to sketch scenery and borrow costumes - although some prints appear to be 'composite' rather than specific tableaux.


Most of the hand-colouring for Impressions of the Russian Ballet booklets was the work of Beaumont and his wife, Alice, and it is possible that both were also involved in colouring the prints, although eventually other artists were employed on both projects. (12665)

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Art

Dance

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