The Dance of Anitra

The Dance of Anitra is a 1909 bronze statuette by the English artist Edith Maryon. The work depicts the Canadian dancer Maud Allan performing Anitra's Dance from Peer Gynt, a play by Henrik Ibsen that was set to music by Edvard Grieg. 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 53 cm (21 in) tall. It captures Allan mid-dance, emphasizing her grace and movement as well as her sensuality. The scene it depicts takes place in the fourth of the play's five acts, which follow 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 the first of two four-song suites that became some of his best-known compositions. 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 symbolic expression, 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 with Rudolf Steiner. Like The Dance of Anitra, these translated the grace and lightness of dance to 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, Dreweatts, noted it as one of the few works by Maryon known to survive in private hands.