Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Tempus rite impensum sapiens non revocat
Brush and gray and off-white oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a dark 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 80
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 the pertinent text: "___ ille potens sui, / Laetusque deget, cui licet in diem / Dixesse, vixi: cras vel atra / Nube polum, pater, occupato, / Vel sole puro: non tamen irritum / Quodcumque retro est, efficiet: neque / Diffinget, infectumque reddet / Quod fugiens semel hora vexit" (Master of himself and joyful will that man live who day by day can say: 'I have lived to-day; tomorrow let the Father fill the heaven with murky clouds, or radiant sunshine! Yet he will not render vain whatever now is past, nor will he alter and undo what once the fleeting hour has brought'). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book III, 29, lines 41-48.

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. 92, no. 192.

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