Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Varium pecuniae dominium

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.

7 1/8 x 5 11/16 inches (181 x 145 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 57

Inscription:

Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Varium pecúniae dominiúm (title) / Imperat aút servit collecta pecúnia cúique / Tortúm digna seqúi potiús qúam ducere fúnem" (Money stored up is for each his lord or his slave, but ought to follow, not lead the twisted rope). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 10, lines 47-48.

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. 85, no. 169.

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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