ABSTRACT
During the eighteenth century, the French royal collection grew considerably. The sale of the English royal collection after the beheading of Charles I in 1649 provided a major opportunity, and so did the financial difficulties of the French banker Jabach in 1671, for Jabach possessed pictures that had belonged to the Duke of Mantua. By the end of his reign Louis XIV owned,nearly 1,500 pictures by Old Masters, a fine collection of classical antiquities, and thousands of drawings. As early as 1692, it had been recognised that these works of art should be more publicly available, but in practice policy fluctuated. By about 1785 most of the paintings were in the Louvre, then still a royal palace.
