A Grand Tableau: Charles Le Brun's Portrait of the Jabach Family

Few things are more exciting than the rediscovery of a lost but storied work of art. This Bulletin examines Charles Le Brun’s spectacular Everhard Jabach (1618–1695) and His Family, a landmark of Western portraiture that was long thought destroyed—known only from photographs taken before World War II—when it was found hanging in an English country house, where it had languished for more than a century prior to its acquisition by The Met. The authors tease out the many secrets bound up in Le Brun’s canvas and its extraordinary sitter, who was one of the greatest art collectors of seventeenth-century Europe.