Otto van Veen

Image not available

Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Cum fructu peregrinandum

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 3/4 inches (182 x 146 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 49

Notes:

Watermark: since the drawings are laid down, no watermarks, if any, are visible, even with fiber-optic light.
Engraved in reverse, 1607, p. 107.
Also see records on Van Veen Album (III, 146-157).

Inscription:

Inscribed indecipherably by the artist, at upper left on the hillside, in black ink, "a... a...". On the album page below the design, in another hand, in brown ink, "Cum fructú peregrinandum (title)/ Quid brevi fòrtes iaclamur aevo/ Multa, qúid terras, alio calentes/ Sole mutamus? patriae quis exul/ Se qúoqúe fúgit" (Why do we strive so hard in our brief lives for great possessions? Why do we change our own land for climes warmed by a foreign sun? What exile from his country ever escaped himself as well?). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book II, 16, lines 17-20.

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. 82, no. 161.

Catalog link:

See more information »

Artist page:

School:

Century:

Classification:

Department: