Charity

Charity shown as a young mother surrounded by children came from Italian tradition. In France she had usually been a young woman holding a heart. Jacques Blanchard painted her the Italian way at least seven times, changing the number of children and the shape of the canvas, in the 1630s, when charitable work stood at the centre of Paris piety and Vincent de Paul was gathering the Ladies of Charity. In 1636 the engraver Pierre Daret, a close friend whose wedding Blanchard had attended, made a print of this version with a poem in praise of Charity beneath it.

In 1662 Louis XIV bought the canvas from Everhard Jabach, a Cologne-born banker and one of the great collectors in Paris. At Versailles it hung first in the cabinet of the king's son, the Grand Dauphin, and later above a door in the Salon de Mercure, where a guidebook recorded it in 1738. It reached the Louvre in 1814. The picture was transferred onto a new canvas in 1942, and only during a restoration in 1983 and 1984 did the signature and date come to light near one child's legs, Jaques Blanchard 1633.