Provenance
Private collection
Note: This hand coloured print depicts a scene from Mikhail Fokine's ballet Narcisse, music by Tcherepnine, designed by Leon Bakst, premiered by by the Diaghilev Ballets Russes, 1911. The scene comes at the end of the ballet as the woodland creatures see Narcissus transformed into a flower.
In all these works, Beaumont and Ethelbert White strove to capture the exact moments of the ballet as well as artists' interpretations. Possibly the design of each hand coloured 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.