‘Life is short, art is long’: the couple who poured their grief into collecting child portraits

After their daughter died aged 19, Yannick and Ben Jakober began amassing 165 paintings of children at their Mallorca museum - many with similarly tragic family stories attached

When Yannick and Ben Jakober’s daughter died aged 19, they poured their grief into art. The couple transformed their small set of portraits of children into the Nins, a one-of-its-kind collection. Numbering 165 paintings of children from the 16th to the 19th centuries, it includes works by old masters such as Ottavio Leoni, Frans Pourbus the Younger and François Quesnel, commissioned to capture the offspring of European royalty and the aristocracy in their most vulnerable years. Many did not live to adulthood.

When I meet the Jakobers, it’s towards the end of Mallorca’s holiday season. The taxi taking me to the north-east of the island passes a large black and white billboard advertising their museum (“Life is short. Art is long”), before turning on to a single-track road heading into the hills.

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