Artwork story
About The Jabach Family
The artist and artwork
Charles Le Brun painted The Jabach Family around 1660 on a royal scale. The oil on canvas is more than nine feet high and eleven feet wide. German-born banker and collector Everhard Jabach sits beside his wife, Anna-Maria, their four children, and a dog. Le Brun gives every face a presence but also makes the room a portrait of Jabach's identity. Books, sculpture, mathematical instruments, textiles, and paintings turn the collection into a family member.
The world around it
Jabach moved to Paris in 1638, built a house near the present-day Centre Pompidou, and formed one of Europe's most important collections of paintings and drawings; much of it later entered the Louvre. The portrait coincided with that new house and the opening of the era associated with Louis XIV's monarchy. Le Brun had helped found the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1648 and would become First Painter to the King in 1662. Financier-collector and ascending court artist met as wealth, knowledge, and monarchy were staged for public view.
A detail to notice
The most surprising portrait is barely in the room. In a black-framed mirror behind Jabach, Le Brun reflects himself at work, dipping his brush into white paint. The canvas beside him is too small to be this enormous family picture, so the reflection complicates rather than explains the scene. It may honor friendship, acknowledge artistic labor, advertise Jabach's devotion to painting, or present art as a mirror of nature; no single reading is certain. The painting's later life repeats the trick. Sold by the family in 1791, it hung from 1832 in an English country house with its upper canvas folded to fit. Long thought destroyed and known mostly from photographs, it was rediscovered, unfolded, and conserved. A portrait built to display treasures became a lost treasure, and the artist was waiting in the mirror.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is painting made in Oil on canvas and held in the European Paintings department.
Recorded dimensions include 110 1/4 × 129 1/8 in. (280 × 328 cm).
Subject terms include Interiors, Boys, Girls, Infants, Men, and Self-portraits. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Purchase, Mrs. Charles Wrightsman Gift, in honor of Keith Christiansen, 2014.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
- The Met object record and curatorial overview: The Jabach Family
- The Met: Making a Scene in Paris in the Age of Louis XIV
- The Met: Reflections, Charles Le Brun's Mirrored Presence in the Jabach Portrait
- The Met Bulletin: A Grand Tableau, Charles Le Brun's Portrait of the Jabach Family
- The Met object record: Allegory in Honor of Cardinal Richelieu
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