Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Mors ultima linea rerum est

Brush and gray oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a dark brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium.

7 3/4 x 5 3/4 inches (196 x 146 mm)

Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.

Van Veen Album, folio 102

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 on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Mors última linea r[er] úm est (title) / Post labores, artiúm stúdia, dignitates, opes, seqúúntúr / flagella, Dolores, aliaque mala, vitam fugacem exercitantia, / Sola virtús manet súperstes" (The labors, study of arts, honors, and wealth are followed by scourges, suffering, and other evils which trouble fleeting life; only Virtue survives). The title occurs in Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 16, line 79; no source given for the other lines in the 1607 "Emblemata".

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. 98, no. 214.

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