Anna Pavlova with 'Jack'

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• Anna Pavlova (1881-1931), Ballet dancer. Sitter in 31 portraits.

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• Lafayette (Lafayette Ltd) (active 1880-1962), Photographers. Artist or producer associated with 6908 portraits.

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• Gibson, Robin, The Face in the Corner: Animal Portraits from the Collections of the National Portrait Gallery, 1998, p. 74
• Robin Gibson, Pets in Portraits, 2015, p. 111 Read entry

  A legend in her own lifetime, the famous Russian dancer was prima ballerina at the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg by the age of twenty-five. Pavlova spent one season with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909 and then created her own company, touring the world until she finally burnt herself out and died before reaching fifty. If she had a home anywhere, it was at Ivy House in Golders Green, London, a palatial villa with a park-sized garden, where she returned every year for a brief resting period and where she kept her theatrical costumes and music library in the cellar. There too she created a spectacular garden and kept a collection of her favourite birds. There were dogs as well, notably a Boston terrier named Poppy and a French bulldog named Duke, but, according to her husband’s biography, these all fell victim to quarantine regulations on her tours and ended up being parked on friends in various parts of the world.

  Pavlova’s most famous solo was ‘The Dying Swan’, originally choreographed for her by Mikhail Fokine in 1905, and in which she was painted by Sir John Lavery for the once well-known picture in the Tate Gallery. It was perhaps inevitable that an admirer would present her with a pair of mute swans, and Jack and his mate arrived soon after she had acquired Ivy House with its specially enlarged lake in 1913. Jack appears to have behaved like any ordinary swan – ‘a splendid big bird, but rather bad-tempered and unapproachable’ – until after Pavlova’s return to Britain in 1918, when an unidentified swan expert offered to tame it. ‘The results ... soon showed themselves. Jack became quite tame and his family increased rapidly from two to eight ... [Pavlova] would take him on her knees and twine his neck around hers and Jack would take it all without the slightest protest.’ Jack must have been at least fifteen, a good age for a swan, when this extraordinary photograph was taken, and one cannot help thinking it gives very real substance to the Leda myth. He was succeeded by his son, also named Jack, who outlived their remarkable mistress.

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• Place made: United Kingdom: England, London (Ivy House, Hampstead, London)

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