Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Virtus inconcussa

Brush and gray 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.

8 x 6 1/2 inches (203 x 165 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 1

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:

Inscribed by the artist within the design, in brown ink, on scrolls at left and right, "NEC METV" and "NEC SPE"; at extreme lower center, "virtus repulsae nescia sordidae in / contaminatis fulget honorib[u]s / nec sumit aut ponit secures". On the album page below the design, in another hand, in brown ink, "Virtus inconcussa (title) / Virtús repúlsae nescia sordidae, in / contaminatis fulget honoribus, / nec sumit aut ponit secures / arbitrio popúlaris aúrae" (True worth, that never knows ignoble defeat, shines with undimmed glory, nor takes up nor lays aside the axes at the fickle mob's behest). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book III, 2, lines 17-20.

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:

Stampfle, Felice, with the assistance of Ruth S. Kraemer and Jane Shoaf Turner. Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries and Flemish Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1991, p. 68, no. 113.

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