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THE DISPERSAL AND FORMATION OF SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE’S COLLECTION OF DRAWINGS 27that he acquired them during his Italian period. If this
deduction is correct, then these drawings too would have
been among the group brought to France by Mini. It
may be that Rubens acquired the first fruits among the
Michelangelos in the Fontainebleau ateliers.
In 1671 , part of Jabach’s first collection was ceded –
at a price of 220 , 000 livres, not as disadvantageous as
Jabach himself claimed and later historians have gener-
ally accepted – to the French crown, and this forms
today the single most important source of the Louvre’s
holdings.15 7 But the 5 , 542 drawings included in this sale
did not constitute Jabach’s entire collection. This was
already stated, discreetly, by Mariette in his preface to the
1741 catalogue of the sale of Crozat’s collection: “Mon-
sieur Jabach...en vendant au roi ses tableaux et ses des-
seins, s’ ́etoit reserv ́ e une partie de desseins, et ce n’ ́ etoient ́
pas certainement les moins beau.” What Mariette did
not say, however, although he hinted at it, is that the
precious sheets that Jabach retained for himself seem to
have been withheld from the crown in secret. And Jabach
was also cunning in his dealings. He certainly sold the
crown some drawings that he knew to be copies, keep-
ing the originals for himself. But on the credit side, it
might be adduced that although Jabach is often thought
to have mutilated some of his drawings, subdividing them
in order to isolate individual figures more effectively, it is
byno means certain that the fragmentary state of many
of the drawings that come from his collection is Jabach’s
ownwork. For example, a recently identified fragment
byMichelangelo, Inv. 8026 /J 15 , once formed part of the
same sheet as Inv. 722 /J 14 /Corpus 31. But whereas Inv.
722 retained its attribution to Michelangelo in Jabach’s
collection, Inv. 8026 seems never to have been connected
with the artist. Had Jabach himself divided the sheet, it is
unlikely that he would have failed to class the two draw-
ings under the same name and hardly credible that he
would have devalued Inv. 8026 bypassing it to a less
prestigious one. It is more probable that the sheet was
divided before Jabach acquired it, and that he failed to
notice that the two fragments had once formed a single
whole.
Jabach’s first collection was divided into two categories,
those that were fully mounted (what were called the
“dessins d’ordonnance” before recent research on his col-
lection showed that the term had been misused) and those
that were not, the so-called “rebut”. The versos of the
mounted drawings were inscribed in red chalk in a private
code of classification, which referred to their dimensions
and their school. There are no such inscriptions on the
unmounted drawings. Nevertheless, all the drawings sold
byJabach to the crown – that is all the drawings fromJabach’s collection that are now in the Louvre – both
mounted and unmounted – bear the famous paraph in
ink (Lugt 2959 ). This is sometimes taken to be his collec-
tor’s mark, but it was in fact applied by Jabach personally
only to those drawings that he sold.
Following the sale of 1671 , and when his fortunes had
been re-established, Jabach formed a second collection
of drawings, which at his death in 1696 numbered over
4 , 500 , almost as large as the first collection. Like the first,
the second collection was also divided into two categories,
the fully mounted and unmounted. The mounted draw-
ings from the second collection, which are now found
in public collections, are mounted in precisely the same
wayas those from the first collection and bear similar
inscriptions on their versos, and although Jabach proba-
blycontinued the same mounting and classifying system,
it is evident that some of these drawings were ones he
had already owned in 1671. Thus, in the Mus ́ee Atger at
Montpellier (Inv.37 7), there is a sheet of mounted draw-
ings, which bears on its verso Jabach’s inscription 128 ,
anumber missing from the Jabach inventory of 1671.
However, none of Jabach’s “dessins d’ordonnance” now
in collections other than that of the Louvre bears the
famous paraph.
Jabach’s second collection also included drawings
byMichelangelo – indeed, some of the Michelangelo
drawings owned by Rubens and Happart may have
been among them. However, only eleven drawings
byMichelangelo are recorded specifically among the
mounted drawings in the posthumous inventory of his
second collection, drawn up in 1696. None of these
eleven can now be identified with certainty – although
it is possible that Cat. 66 byRaffaello da Montelupo was
among them – and how many of them were genuine
is debatable.15 8This is puzzling because the collector and
artistic patron Pierre Crozat, “le roi des collectioneurs” in
Lugt’s phrase, possessed a remarkable group of Michelan-
gelo drawings, which, according to Mariette, came mostly
from Jabach: Directly after the passage quoted previously
he added, “Monsieur Crozat les acquit de ses ( Jabach’s)
heritiers.” This purchase would have been made from ́
Jabach’s second collection. However, because so few
drawings by Michelangelo were individually recorded in
the 1696 inventory, Jabach had either disposed of them
before his death to a third party, from whom Crozat later
bought them – Crozat does not seem to have begun col-
lecting drawings on a large scale before 1696 –orelse,
which seems much more probable, most of the Michelan-
gelo drawings that remained in Jabach’s hands at his death
were listed so vaguely among the unmounted drawings
that their true value was concealed. Portfolios that might