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Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Habenda imprimis animi cura

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629

Habenda imprimis animi cura

7 1/8 x 5 7/8 inches (181 x 149 mm)
Brush and light brown gray oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a reddish brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium.
Van Veen Album, folio 24

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

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).
Inscriptions/Markings
Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Habenda imprimis animi cura (title)/ Qúa laedunt oculos festinas demere/ Est animúm differs curandi tempus in omne" (Why indeed are you in a hurry to remove things which hurt the eye, while if aught is eating into your soul, you put off the time for cure till next year?). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 2, lines 38-39.
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. 75, no. 136.
Classification
Century Drawings
School
Department