Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Varia senectae bona
Brush and light brown and gray oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a 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 (181 x 147 mm)
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.
Van Veen Album, folio 78
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: 

There is no inscription on the album page. Opposite the illustration in the 1607 "Emblemata", however, are the above title (probably Van Veen's own words) and pertinent texts. The first reads: "Multa ferunt anni venientes commoda secum, / Multa recedentes adimunt" (Many blessings do the advancing years bring with them; many as they retire, they take away). The text is from Horace, "Ars poetica", lines 175-76. The second is from Philippus, a Greek epigrammist of the reign of Tiberius: "Somnum, Gustum, Cupidinem, Ludum, aliaque iuuenilia oblectamenta, tempus à viro senescente depellit: at contrà, vt communis medicus abundè damna resarciens, varias animi dotes, Prudentium, Temperantiam, aliasq, virtutes, grandiori, aetati conuenientes, adducit" (From the aging man, time takes away sleep, taste desire, sport, and other youthful pleasures, but like a kindly doctor generously mending injuries, it confers on the soul various gifts, like prudence, temperance and other virtues befitting greater years).

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. 91, no. 190.

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