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).
Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Quod satis est cúi contingit nihil ampliús optet (title) / Dume ex parvo nobis tantúndem haúrire relinquas, / Cur túa plus landes cúmeris granaria nostris, / Ut tibi si sit opús liquidi non amplius urna / Vel cyatho, dicas, magno de flúmine mallem / Qúam ex hoc fonticúlo tantúndem súmere, eô fit / Plenior út si quos delectat copia jústo / Cum ripa simúl avúlsos ferat aufidas acer. / At qúi tantúlo eget, quanto est opus, is neque limo / Túrbatam haúrit aqúam, neque vitam amittit in undis" (So long as you let us take just as much from our little one [little heap] why praise your granaries above our bins? It is as if you needed no more than a jug or a cup of water, and were to say, 'I'd rather have taken the quantity from a broad river than from this tiny brook'. So it comes about that when any find pleasure in undue abundance, raging Aufidus sweeps them away, bank and all; while the man who craves only so much as he needs, neither draws water thick with mud, nor loses his life in the flood). The title is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 2, line 46. The text is "Satires", Book I, lines 52-60.
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. 83, no. 165.