One could go on forever with horn iconography, but the purpose here was to give the reader a taste of what I found. If one kept looking for images of the XVIIIth century, one would keep seeing the same thing over and over again in a very large majority of them : fixed-pitch horns were, even years after Mozart’s death, still played in ensemble concerts… and played bells up. Exceptions are rare. Crooks, and even hand-stopping technique, are almost never pictured (the reader has probably seen them all here). This is 50 years after Hampel improved the hand technique, and 90 years after the invention of crooks.
Nothing can inform a researcher better than a picture. I started to seek horn iconography of the XVIIIth century very early in my research and did not know what to expect. The results are extremely uplifting. Here are some of the pictures I found, dated from around the 1760’s to a few years after Mozart’s death. Most of them come from the Facebook group « Portraits of Unknown Baroque & Classical Era Musicians », and the very recent iconography website of John Manganaro1.
