Pietro Annigoni: Margot Fonteyn

Drawing of Margot Fonteyn
by Pietro Annigoni

Painting of Margot Fonteyn
by Pietro Annigoni

"A few months after my work at Buckingham Palace ended I began the portrait of the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, which was commissioned by her husband and shown at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition the following year, 1956. She gave me sixteen sittings and, as was to be expected, she held the pose extremely well, but I often wished she would relax a little from her role of prima ballerina. After all, I was not painting her as a prima ballerina, but as the Señora Doña de Arias, wife of the Panamanian ambassador in London, and she wore, not a tutu, but a tight-waited, wide-skirted, white dress embroidered with scarlet flowers, that was said to be the national costume of Panama. She snowed no interest in the progress of the portrait and conversation between us was such hard going that, until 1969, when I saw her dance for the first time - with Nureyev in 'Swan Lake' at Covent Garden - I had only rather unpleasant memories of the whole episode.

That experience of her art changed, magically, all my earlier feelings about her, and I went home and wrote a 'rave notice' in my diary.

 'Margot Fonteyn is great. They say she is in her fifties. If it's true she is an amazing phenomenon; not only because of the virtuosity of a perfect ballerina but, above all, her mime, mime that is a language impossible to misunderstand, an explosion of love, an outburst of overwhelming, young, virginal love - wasted, however, on that dolt of a Siegfried. After the performance I saw her in her dressing-room. Banal cordiality on both sides. She told me that the portrait I painted of her thirteen years ago, had returned to London, having been for some time in Panama and then in New York. I had never seen her on the stage until this evening, and I didn't really like her because of her prima ballerina manner offstage. Now I've changed my mind. She is entitled to give herself all the airs she likes, she is a great artist.'"

To be continued 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)