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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Heres instar vulturis esse solet
7 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches (181 x 146 mm)
Brush 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; incised with the stylus.
Van Veen Album, folio 63
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.
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).
Engraved in reverse, 1607.
Also see records on Van Veen Album (III, 146-157).
Inscriptions/Markings
Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Heres instar vúltúris esse solet (title) _____ anús improba Thebis/ Ex testamento sic est elata, cadaver/ Únctúm oleo largo, núdis húmeris tulit heres,/ Scilicet elabi si posset mortúa, credo/ Quod nimiúm institerat viventi" (A wicked old crone at Thebes, by terms of her will, was buried thus: her corpse, well oiled, her heir carried on her bare shoulders. She wanted, of course, to see whether she could give him the slip when dead. I suppose, when she was living, he had borne too hard upon her). The text is from Horace, "Satires", Book II, 5, lines 84-88.
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. 86-87, no. 175.
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Century Drawings
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