Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Virtuti sapientia comes

Brush and off-white 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 3/16 x 5 3/4 inches (182 x 146 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 4

Inscription:

Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Virtúti sapientia comes (title) / Virtutus est vitiúm fugere, et sapientia prima / Stultitia carúisse" (To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 1, lines 41-42.

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:

Stampfle, Felice, with the assistance of Ruth S. Kraemer and Jane Shoaf Turner. Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries and Flemish Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1991, p. 69, no. 116.

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).

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