Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis
Brush and off-white and 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.
7 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches (180 x 146 mm)
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.
Van Veen Album, folio 84
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 (a familiar saying) and the pertinent text: "Damnosa quid non imminuit dies? / Aetas parentum peior avis, tulit / Nos nequiores, mox daturos, / Progeniem vitiosiorem" (What do the ravages of time not injure! Our parents' age, worse than our grandsires', has brought forth us less worthy and destined soon to yield an offspring still more wicked). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book III, 6, lines 45-48.

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. 93, no. 196.

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