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| Anonymous German artist Two Women Dancing around a Potted Plant ca. 1810 drawing (book illustration) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Alfred Edward Chalon Monsieur Bégrand, mon maître de danse ca. 1810 drawing British Museum |
"Caricature portrait of Monsieur Bégrand, a dancing master, whole-length in profile to left, holding a violin under his left arm, exclaiming, "Rentrez bien la ceinture." Drawn by his London pupil Alfred Edward Chalon, born in Geneva, but settled in England with his family as a child. Chalon exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1810, and eventually became Painter in Watercolour to Queen Victoria. With his brother John James Chalon, he founded the Chalon Sketching Society in 1808."
– curator's notes from the British Museum
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| Lebas Dance Plate - À Droite sur les Côtés ca. 1815 hand-colored engraving Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Lebas Dance Plate - La Valse ca. 1815 hand-colored engraving Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| John Flaxman Dance of Three Girls evoking the Three Graces before 1826 drawing British Museum |
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| Cecil Elizabeth Drummond Domestic Scene of Dancing ca. 1829 watercolor Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Vincenzo Feoli after Domenico del Frate Dancing Bacchante of Herculaneum ca. 1800-1825 engraving Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| George Frederic Watts Nymphs and Satyrs ca. 1840 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"The primacy of the nymph in Keats's poems, such as Endymion and Lamia, as well as the dryad in Ode to a Nightingale, was criticised by the rural poet John Clare, who complained of Keats's "constant allusion or illusion to the grecian mythology" found in the "dryads & fawns" and "naiades" that often accompany his evocations of outdoor scenery. In his Essay on Landscape, Clare had attacked the tendency for painting to represent the natural world as "crowded with groups of satyrs & fawns & naiads & dryads & a whole catalogue of vampire unaccountables dancing about in ridiculous situations," something that points to the impression made by Stothard and Westall, as well as Poussin, whose legacy was fashionable at this time. George Frederic Watts's Nymphs and Satyrs [directly above], and The Golden Age both show such influences."
– from curator's essay at the Tate Gallery
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| Daniel Maclise Dance of the Fairies ca. 1850 drawing Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Rodolphe Bresdin Dancing Fauns before 1885 etching Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Aubrey Beardsley Salomé's Dance of the Seven Veils (illustration to Oscar Wilde's Salomé) 1894 line block print Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Aubrey Beardsley Bathyllus in the Swan Dance (illustration to Juvenal) 1896 drawing Victoria & Albert Museum |
"Aubrey Beardsley's distinctive black and white drawings for Oscar Wilde's Salomé, published in 1894, brought him extraordinary notoriety whilst still in his early twenties. His work for the periodical The Yellow Book confirmed his position as the most innovative illustrator of the day, but as a result of the hostile moralistic outcry that followed the arrest and trial of Oscar Wilde in early 1895, John Lane and other publishers panicked and dropped Beardsley. Thereafter, almost the only publisher who would use his drawings was Leonard Smithers. Smithers was a brilliant but shady character who operated on the fringes of the rare book trade, issuing small, clandestine editions of risqué books, with the boast 'I will publish the things the others are afraid to touch.' Smithers encouraged Beardsley's already growing interest in French, Latin and Greek texts of this kind and commissioned drawings to illustrate Aristophanes's famously bawdy satirical play Lysistrata, and the Satires of the late Roman poet Juvenal. Beardsley made a number of drawings to illustrate Juvenal's sixth satire, Against Women. Two of these represent Bathyllus, a character referred to by the author only in passing. Bathyllus was an effeminate dancer, much admired by decadent Roman audiences for his lewd and suggestive performances. In the first design [directly above] Beardsley makes specific reference to the text in which Bathyllus is described as acting the part of Leda, a maiden seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan in Greek myth. In this relatively decorous image, the dancer makes an overtly camp gesture of modesty and rejection of the swan's advances. . . . Beardsley, who delighted in coded references to depravity, told Smithers, 'I am doing a Bathyllus No. 2 [directly below], as I feel I cannot say all I want to about him in one picture.' In this, the more suggestive of the two illustrations, Bathyllus's pose and gestures are unequivocally obscene."
– curator's notes from the Victoria & Albert Museum
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| Aubrey Beardsley Bathyllus (illustration to Juvenal) 1896 (printed 1906) line block print Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Jean-Louis Forain The Dancer's Dressing-room 1895 lithograph British Museum |