The Dance of Anitra is a 1909 bronze statuette by the English sculptor Edith Maryon. The work depicts the Canadian dancer Maud Allan performing Anitra's Dance from Peer Gynt, an 1867 play by Henrik Ibsen for which Edvard Grieg composed incidental music. Maryon created the work at the height of Allan's fame, known as her "Conquest of London": eighteen months of shows at the Palace Theatre, during which Allan emerged as a fashion icon, sex symbol, and controversial figure.
The statuette is made of bronze and stands tall. It captures Allan mid-dance, emphasising her grace, movement and sensuality. The scene takes place in the fourth act of the play, which follows Peer Gynt as he is outcast from his Norwegian home and spends decades travelling abroad. While posing as a prophet to a desert tribe in Morocco, he is enraptured by the dancing of Anitra, attempts to seduce her, and is swindled out of his gold. Grieg's music accompanying the dance was later combined into two suites, which became some of his best-known works. Allan adapted the first Grieg suite, and with it Anitra's Dance, into her repertoire in February 1909, the same month that Maryon made the sculpture.
The Dance of Anitra is representative of Maryon's oeuvre from the middle of her career, which combined classical technique with deeper spiritual or philosophical ideas, and belongs to a category of her works pairing emotional and spiritual aspects. It is one of two sculptures by Maryon depicting Allan, both made around the same time. It also presages Maryon's work on eurythmy figures a decade later, after she joined the anthroposophy movement and became a close collaborator of Rudolf Steiner. Like The Dance of Anitra, these translated the grace and lightness of dance into the sculptural form.
The work was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in the summer of 1909, and at the Walker Art Gallery in the autumn of 1910. Reviewers at the time praised the work for its charm and grace; one wrote that Maryon had "overcome the difficulty of pourtraying the poetry of motion". It was auctioned in 2025, attributed to a private collection in Wiltshire. The auction house noted it as one of the few works by Maryon known to survive in private hands.
Background Edith Maryon
Edith Maryon was born in London on 9 February 1872. She was educated both there and in Geneva; upon her return she studied art, including at the Royal College of Art. Between 1899 and 1912, she exhibited numerous works, particularly at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Walker Art Gallery; with the former exhibition held during the summer and the latter in the autumn, many of her works were exhibited at both. These works, according to her biographer , tended to fall into five categories: first, the world of external physical being; second, references to the elemental world; third, motifs reflecting the human soul; fourth, allegorical works representing spiritual forces and beings; and fifth, a combination of emotional and spiritual aspects.
Maryon was interested in the esoteric at least as early as 1909, and in 1914 moved to Dornach to join the anthroposophical movement led by Rudolf Steiner. Over the next decade, until her death in 1924, Maryon became a close collaborator of Steiner; among other contributions while there, she was heavily involved in creating both the monumental sculpture The Representative of Humanity, and the eurythmy figures depicting an anthroposophical form of dance.
Peer Gynt Anitra's Dance takes place in Act IV of Henrik Ibsen's 1867 play Peer Gynt. The five-act play chronicles the journey of its titular character from the Norwegian mountains to far-flung places including the North African desert and Panama, before returning. Edvard Grieg composed extensive incidental music for the play, including a movement to accompany the dance.
Play
The first three acts of Peer Gynt trace his transformation from liar and layabout to outcast. After running away with Ingrid, an engaged heiress who prefers him, he spurns her entreaties the next morning, saying he was merely "hot for a girl". The parish forms a mob to set out and kill Peer, who declares that he shall set out "To the sea" and "further still".
Act IV opens years later, with Peer a handsome and wealthy middle-aged gentleman. He is eating dinner by the south-west coast of Morocco, and regales four travel companions, taken aboard his steam yacht in Gibraltar, with his life's story: In his telling, he was betrothed to a woman "of royal blood", but objected to her father's request that he take a title in order to marry her. He left, he says, then made his fortune trading slaves to the Carolinas, and heathen images to China. Peer's companions set about to rob him and commandeer his yacht. Gold and yacht gone, Peer heads into the desert, where he discovers a richly caparisoned horse, jewels, and sacred robes, that had been stolen from a Moorish emperor and then abandoned.
Newly adorned in imperial regalia, Peer is taken as a prophet by a desert tribe. As he sits in a tent, girls dance in his honour and sing his praises; Anitra is among them, and approaches him afterwards. Peer commands her and the others to dance for him, in what becomes Anitra's Dance: "Dance for me, women! The prophet wants to forget the past." Peer is enamoured with Anitra, offering a monologue on her looks, and attempts to seduce her. She, in turn, persuades him to gift his jewels to her. When Peer attempts to ride away with her on his horse, she persuades him to dismount and lead the horse, then hand her his "heavy bag" of gold to save him the effort of carrying it—then gallops back to her oasis. The act closes with Peer assessing his life and options, deciding to go forward as a historian, and heading to Egypt.
Music
Though published in 1867, Peer Gynt was not performed until 1876; it was then put on in an abridged form, with musical passages substituted for certain scenes. Ibsen originally conceived of replacing Act IV with "a tone-poem which would indicate the content and would be accompanied by a few living pictures or tableaux presenting the most appropriate situations in the Act which had been omitted, e.g. Peer Gynt and the Arab girls". He was ultimately persuaded to simply make cuts to the dialogue, although some further productions contained additional cuts, including to Act IV. Grieg's original score included around two dozen movements. He wrote Anitra's Dance to be performed as Anitra and the other girls dance, "conceived as an accompaniment to Peer Gynt's monologue ... played behind the scene pianissimo".
Grieg's music for Anitra's Dance included parts for violins, viola, cello, double bass, and triangle. Writing in a 1910 biography of Grieg, Henry Theophilus Finck wrote that "In Anitra's Dance there are wondrous bars ... which seem to contain the quintessence of all that is blissful and ecstatic in love — the 'voluptuous mystery' of the East. The music is European in its rhythms and exquisite melodies, yet by some strange magic of genius Grieg seems to give it the very atmosphere of the tent in the wilds of Morocco where the Arab girl enchants Peer Gynt with her beauty and her graceful movements."
Grieg's music for Peer Gynt had a legacy outlasting the play. He created two suites from eight of the movements, with Anitra's Dance included in the first. The suites quickly became popular, being performed by orchestras worldwide; they are still among Grieg's best-known works, alongside his Piano Concerto.
Maud Allan
Maud Allan rose to fame as a dancer around 1906, with her Vienna debut of The Vision of Salome. The dance, performed to music by Marcel Remy, was a rendition of Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils before the beheading of John the Baptist. The performances were both successful and controversial—the latter helping to feed the former—in no small part due to the fact that Allan's costume only minimally covered her breasts.
Allan's break came when she was invited to dance before King Edward VII in September 1907. The performance facilitated an introduction to Alfred Butt, the managing director and chairman of London's Palace Theatre, which in turn facilitated a two-week residency there. Allan was an overnight success; two weeks became eighteen months. At the height of her "Conquest of London", as it was known, she broke box-office records, made £250 () a week from the Palace, and commanded the same price for her many private recitals. She was at ease with and embraced by society, became both a fashion icon and a sex symbol, and contributed to an outbreak of "Salomania". Her private life, including rumoured affairs with the Second Duke of Westminster and the Prime Minister's wife Margot Asquith, also became the subject of much gossip, inspiring two romans à clef: Salome and the Head, by E. Nesbit, and the anonymous and pornographic Maudie.
Another product of Allan's fame was the proliferation of flower-pot statuettes of her sold at the gift shops along Bond Street. Many of these were made in porcelain by German manufacturers, such as Kister and Galluba & Hofmann. They tended to depict her most striking poses of her most famous role, Salome, and often mirrored the poses seen on photographic postcards of Allan.
In October 1908, Allan performed for her 250th time at the Palace and—possibly due to exhaustion—suffered a bad fall on stage. She returned to the stage on 12 February 1909, introducing new dances to her set. These included the first Peer Gynt suite, and with it Anitra's Dance. Newspapers at the time variously stated that "Anitra's dance [was] wonderfully captivating" (The Daily Telegraph); Anitra's Dance' was the most charming of the [Peer Gynt] sections" (The Times); "the grace and vivacity of Anitra's dance were charming, but they were not in harmony with the Eastern colour of the music" (The Manchester Guardian); and "Anitra's Dance is delicious, the very spirit of girlish joy" (The Toronto Daily Star). Allan's run at the Palace finally ended in mid-November 1909.
Description One cast of The Dance of Anitra is known, although additional casts may also have been made. The statuette is made of bronze, stands tall, and measures at the base. The words "Dance of Anitra" and "Maud Allan" are both spelt out in capital letters in relief on the sides of the base, which is signed by Maryon and inscribed "Feb 1909".
The work depicts Allan in the midst of performing Anitra's Dance from Peer Gynt. According to the auction house Dreweatts, "The depiction of Maud Allan in this bronze captures the dancer's charisma, mysticism, movement and sensual stage presence as she performs the seductive dance which emphasises the grace and beauty of Anitra". By the time it was auctioned in 2025, Dreweatts noted that the sculpture appeared untouched in natural light but showed a patina and some wear around the extremities, such as the fingers, shoulders and base. Dreweatts said that the sculpture had accumulated slight dirt and could use a light cleaning.
Themes
According to Raab, The Dance of Anitra represents a fifth-category work by Maryon, combining emotional and spiritual aspects. Another example is Maryon's 1911 work Priestess of Isis. To Dreweatts, it represents Maryon's "distinctive sculptural style that combined classical technique with symbolic expression".