Don Juan and the Commander's Statue (Last Scene of Mozart's Don Giovanni)
Alexandre Evariste Fragonard French
Not on view
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.
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