Artwork · 17th century · Charles Le Brun

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The Jabach Family

Charles Le Brunca. 1660Oil on canvas280 × 328 cm

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At a glance

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A family portrait of Everhard Jabach, a rich merchant and art collector in Paris, with his wife, four children, and a dog.
The French painter Charles Le Brun painted it around 1660 in oil on canvas.
The canvas is about nine feet tall and almost eleven feet wide, and it is full of objects that tell you what this family cared about.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Zoom in on the dark space behind the father. A long-haired man looks out at us, holding a brush in one hand and a palette in the other. He is the painter at work on this very family. Le Brun slipped his own portrait into the picture.
Look at the golden bust on the left. The face wears a helmet over braided hair and turns to one side. A cloth is pinned at the shoulder with a round clasp, and its glossy folds catch the light. It looks as heavy as a real ancient sculpture.
Go down to the floor at lower left. An open book, folded papers, a rolled sheet, a plaster cast of a head, and a gold compass lie in a heap. These are the things of someone who studied art and enjoyed learning.
Zoom in on the baby beside the mother. The baby sits on a red cushion, gripping something round, like a piece of fruit. The girl beside them reaches out a finger to point. The mother's pearl necklace and blue silk dress shine bead by bead and fold by fold.
Look at the gray dog at lower right. It is long-legged and slim, with a red collar, and it sits on a rug. The rug has a dense pattern on a red ground and tassels at the edge. The dog lifts its head toward the family.

When it was painted

Around 1660, Charles Le Brun was just past forty and already a well-known painter in Paris. As a young man he had traveled to Rome with Nicolas Poussin to study ancient sculpture and painting. In 1648 he was among the founders of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Around this time he was also decorating Vaux-le-Vicomte, the château of the finance minister Nicolas Fouquet.

The man who ordered this picture was Everhard Jabach, a Cologne-born banker who had settled in Paris. He collected paintings and drawings on a huge scale. When the collection of the executed English king Charles I was sold off, Jabach bought famous pictures from it. Much of what he gathered was later sold to Louis XIV and is in the Louvre today.

Here is the surprise: Le Brun painted this family twice. This canvas was Jabach's own. It hung in his grand house in Paris and went to the family house in Cologne after his death. The other version went to his wife's family home, also in Cologne. In the 1700s, visitors to the city, among them Goethe and the English painter Joshua Reynolds, saw both.

The two pictures had very different fates. The other version entered a Berlin museum in 1836 and was destroyed in World War II. This one was sold in the 1790s to Henry Hope in London and stayed in England for more than two hundred years. In 2014 the Metropolitan Museum bought it. Britain delayed the export license to give a museum at home the chance to keep it, but none came forward.

A few years after this portrait, Le Brun became First Painter to Louis XIV and went on to paint the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Look again at the man with the brush in the shadows behind the father. A few years before he became the king's painter, Le Brun quietly made himself a place in this family's room.

The painter

Charles Le Brun

1619–1690

All paintings by Charles Le Brun →

The Jabach Family

Questions to think about

Look for itCan you find the globe on the left side of the painting?
Why?Why do you think Le Brun put himself in the shadows of someone else's family portrait?
What about you?Jabach had his favorite books and sculptures painted right alongside his family. If you took a family photo today, which objects would you want in the picture with you?

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