Fanny Elssler (fac. sig.): In the Cracovienne dance, in the ballet of The gipsey

What you are looking at

A young woman in a pale blue skirt and golden/tan corset stands alone in a rocky, mountainous landscape, her body caught mid-turn in an emphatic gesture. Her left arm reaches overhead in an arc while her right extends to the side, and her torso twists with visible energy; her weight appears shifted to one leg as the other lifts. The setting is dramatic: steep stone fortifications and distant castles rise in the background under a moody, clouded sky, suggesting Eastern European terrain. The ground is bare earth and rock. The woman wears red heeled shoes and has dark hair pinned up in the fashion of the 1830s–40s. The print is hand-colored, with careful attention to the luminosity of her skin and the volume of her costume.

The dancing

A single dancer, isolated in the landscape. Her posture shows a sharp rotation of the torso, with the upper body twisted and both arms raised and extended—a vocabulary of Romantic-era theatrical gesture rather than the tight, contained carriage of Classical ballet. The raised arms and lifted leg suggest a moment of propulsion or climactic gesture. Her stance and the asymmetry of her movement suggest she has just pushed off from one leg; the energy is outward and upward, not restrained.

The dance depicted

The work depicts a moment from *The Gypsy*, a ballet by Jules Perrot (1839), performed by the celebrated Austrian dancer Fanny Elssler. The title identifies this as the *Cracovienne dance*—a Polish-national style dance incorporated into the ballet. The *Cracovienne* (or Krakowiak) is a vigorous, syncopated Polish folk form with sharp accents and rapid footwork, and was famously performed by Elssler as a solo showpiece. This image captures the theatrical, exuberant quality of Romantic ballet's fascination with national and exotic material: a European dance style presented as a vehicle for virtuosity and dramatic effect within a narrative ballet.

How it was made

This is a hand-colored engraving or lithograph, characteristic of 1840s theatrical print production. The technique allowed fine detail in the face and drapery while permitting broad washes of color—visible in the sky and landscape. Such prints were mass-produced for a middle-class market hungry for images of celebrated performers; they functioned as souvenirs and promotional material, circulating widely in Europe and America. The hand-coloring suggests this is from the more expensive end of the market, aimed at collectors and enthusiasts rather than casual purchasers.

About this work

This is a record of Fanny Elssler's performance of the Cracovienne, a Polish national dance woven into the romantic ballet *The Gypsy*. Elssler (1810–84) was one of the two supreme ballerinas of her generation—the rival to Marie Taglioni—and her specialty was exactly this: a dancer who could execute the technical demands of classical ballet but who brought warmth, personality, and connection to character and national style. The print preserves a moment of that performance: a solo turn in which the body's energy and individual gesture take precedence over the ethereal, weightless ideal that Taglioni embodied. It is a valuable document of how Romantic ballet incorporated non-Italian, non-aristocratic material, and how different dancers and audiences understood what the new ballet could do.

How to look at it

Attend to the relationship between the body and the landscape: Elssler is not ethereal or weightless, but planted, energetic, and decisively *present* in the rocky terrain. The moment captured is one of dynamic gesture—not a sustained, frozen pose but a turn caught mid-action, with the arms and torso driving the movement. Compare this to images of Taglioni in the same period: where Taglioni floats, Elssler propels. The costume—the fitted corset and full skirt, the red heeled shoes—is characteristic of Romantic-era stage dress, neither the stiff classicism of earlier ballet nor the pointe work and ethereal costuming that would define later 19th-century ballet.

The artist

The artist is not recorded. However, the print comes from a well-established mid-19th-century theatrical print industry. Prints of Elssler were produced by multiple publishers and engravers in London, Paris, Vienna, and New York; they were often unsigned or bore only a publisher's mark. The quality and inscription of this work suggest it was produced by a professional theatrical print house in the 1840s, possibly in London or Paris, where Elssler performed to great acclaim.

The period

The 1830s–40s were the apex of Romantic ballet. Marie Taglioni had defined the ideal of weightlessness and ethereality in works like *La Sylphide* (1832); Fanny Elssler countered with a style rooted in warmth, character, and virtuosity. Ballet was mining European folklore and national style with unprecedented enthusiasm—*La Gypsy* (1839), *La Tarantule* (1839), and Elssler's later *La Cachucha* (1836) all drew on popular and national forms. At the same time, theatrical lithography and engraving had become a major industry, feeding a growing middle-class audience's appetite for images of celebrated performers. Prints like this one were as important to a performer's fame as performances themselves.

Where it lives

The work is held in the New York Public Library's Prints collection, part of a broader series of theatrical and dance prints from the 19th century. It is labeled as a facsimile signature work and carries the collection mark 'Prints depicting dance,' indicating it was catalogued as part of a thematic rather than artist-based or date-based organizing principle.

Dance in this work

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