Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Pecunia a bono et honesto abstrahit

Brush and gray and light brown 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.

7 1/8 x 5 13/16 inches (181 x 147 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 50

Inscription:

Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Pecunia a bono et honesto abstrahit (title) / Perdidit arma, locúm virtútis deseruit, qui / Semper in augendâ, festinat et obruitur re" (A man has lost his weapons, has quitted his post with Virtue, who is ever busied and lost in making money). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 16, lines 67-8.

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. 82-83, no. 162.

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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