Leopold Mozart and His Children Maria Anna and Wolfgang Giving a Concert in Paris

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delafosse

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Recognizing the exceptional musical gifts of his children Nannerl (born 1751) and Wolfgang Amadé (born 1756), the Salzburg court violinist, composer, and teacher Leopold Mozart took them on a three-year tour through Europe, which brought them to Paris between 1763 and April 1764. It was on this occasion that the present engraving was published (after a watercolor today at the Musée Condé, Chantilly). One of the most celebrated works on paper by the portraitist Carmontelle, it exists in several later, though autograph, versions attesting to its early popularity as a work of art—and to that of the child prodigies who commanded Europe’s musical stage. The inscription, though mentioning his father and his sister before the younger Wolfgang Amadeus, who is seated behind a harpsichord, refers to the seven year old as a composer.

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