Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Principum delicta plebs luit

Brush and off-white oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a red-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 (181 x 145 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 87

Inscription:

Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Principúm delicta plebs lúit (title) / Qúidqúid delirant Reges plectúntur Achivi / Seditione dolis scelere atque libidine et irâ / Iliacos intrà múros, peccatúr et extrà" (Whatever folly the kings commit, the Achaeans pay the penalty. With faction, craft, crime, lust and wrath, within and without the walls of Troy all goes wrong). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 2, lines 14-16.

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. 94, no. 199.

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).

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