Don Juan and the Commander's Statue (Last Scene of Mozart's Don Giovanni)

Alexandre Evariste Fragonard

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alexandre Évariste Fragonard was the son of the late rococo painter, Jean Honoré Fragonard. He trained in the studio of Jacques Louis David, but his early Neoclassical manner eventually gave way to a more Romantic sensibility. Here he depicts the final dramatic scene from Mozart’s opera, "Don Giovanni" where the luck of the libertine Don Juan has finally run out. After killing in a duel the father of a young woman he had been seducing, he encounters his statue at a tomb. The statue comes to life and pulls Don Juan down into the fiery pit of hell. Other versions of the subject include a large watercolor in the Detroit Institute of Arts (inv. F79.31) and an oil painting in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art