Everhard Jabach

Everhard Jabach (German: Eberhard Jabach; 10 July 1618 – 9 March 1695) was a German-born banker who became a naturalized French citizen, director of the French East India Company, and a celebrated collector of drawings, paintings, marble sculptures, bronzes, and prints.

Biography

Everhard Jabach was born into a wealthy family whose ancestors had founded a bank in Antwerp. He moved to France in 1638 and was naturalized in 1647. In 1648 he married Anna Maria de Groote of Cologne; the couple had four children.

Two portraits of Jabach survive: an oil by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1688), now in Pesaro, Italy, and a family group by Charles Le Brun, formerly in Berlin’s Bode Museum (destroyed in World War II), with a large version now at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By 1671 his fortune was estimated at two million livres. He served in the Amsterdam-based trading company, oversaw manufactories at Corbeil, and managed his banking interests in Paris.

Art collection

Jabach amassed masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Jan van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer, Bronzino, Orazio Gentileschi, Caravaggio, Correggio, Titian, Rubens, Le Brun, Poussin, and many others, many of which are now in the Louvre.

He also collected drawings, including the “Libro de’ Disegni” assembled by Giorgio Vasari. In 1661–62 and 1671 he sold large portions of his collection—over five thousand drawings—to King Louis XIV, forming the core of the royal collection and later the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Louvre. At his death he left another four thousand drawings in twenty-six portfolios, inventoried and published by the Louvre in 2002.

His Paris residence on rue Saint-Merri, once a salon for literary and theatrical performances attended by Voltaire, is now lost to history.

References

• Mariette, Pierre-Jean (1741). “Note on Jabach’s Drawings.”
• Haskell, Francis (1982). “Everhard Jabach and the Art Market.”
• Louvre Department of Graphic Arts (2002). Catalogue of the Jabach Portfolios.

Further reading

• Schnapper, Antoine (1994). _Curiosity of the Grand Siècle_. Flammarion.
• Monbeig-Goguel, C. (1988). “Taste and Trade in the Jabach Collection,” _The Burlington Magazine_.