Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Quo plus sunt potae, plus sitiuntur aquae
Brush and light brown and gray oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a light brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium; incised with the stylus.
7 1/8 x 5 11/16 inches (181 x 145 mm)
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.
Van Veen Album, folio 52
Notes: 

Watermark: since the drawings are laid down, no watermarks, if any, are visible, even with fiber-optic light.
Engraved in reverse, 1607.
Also see records on Van Veen Album (III, 146-157).

Inscription: 

Inscribed by the artist (?), within the design on the scroll, in dark brown or black ink, "Danda est ellebori multo / nescio an antyciram". The full text on the scroll in the engraving reads, "Danda est hellebori multo pars maxima auris, / Nescio an Anticyram ratio illis destinet omnem" (A big dose of hellbore should be given to the misers, I do not know whether reason intends to purchase the whole of Anticyra for them). On the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Quo plus súnt potae, plus sitiuntur acquáe (title) / Crescit indúlgens sibi dirus hydrops, / Nec sitim pellit, nisi caúsa morbi / Fúgerit venis, et aquosus albo / Corpore languor" (By indulgence the dreadful dropsy grows apace, nor can the sufferer banish thirst, unless the cause of the malady has first departed from the veins and the watery languor from the pale body). The title is from Ovid, "Fasti", Book I, line 216. The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book II, 2, lines 13-16.

Provenance: 
Charles Fairfax Murray (1849-1919), London and Florence; from whom purchased through Galerie Alexandre Imbert, Rome, in 1909 by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), New York (no mark; see Lugt 1509); his son, J. P. Morgan, Jr. (1867-1943), New York.
Bibliography: 

Netherlandish drawings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and Flemish drawings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library / Felice Stampfle ; with the assistance of Ruth S. Kraemer and Jane Shoaf Turner. New York : The Library, 1991, p. 83, no. 164.

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