Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Medio tutissimus ibis

Brush and brown and gray oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a dark gray tone over a light brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium.

7 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches (182 x 146 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 6

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).

Inscription:

Inscribed by the artist, within the design below the two female figures, in brown ink, "Prodigalitas" and "Auarititia". (cf. "Auaritia" of Folio 5). On the album page below the design, in another hand, in brown ink, "Medio tutissimús ibis (title) / Dum vitant stúlti vitia in contraria currúnt" (In avoiding vice, fools run into its opposite). The title is from Ovid, "Metamorphoses", Book II, 137. The text is from Horace, "Satires", Book I, 2, line 24.

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. 70, no. 118.

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