Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Animi servitus perpetua

Brush and off-white 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; incised with the stylus.

7 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches (182 x 146 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 12

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 on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Animi servitús perpetúa (title)/ Evasti? credo metúes doctusqúe cavebis:/ Quares quando iterum paveas, iterúmque perire/ Possis, o toties servús! quae bellua ruptis/ Cúm semel effúgit reddit se prava catenis" (Suppose you have escaped: then, I take it, you will be afraid and cautious after your lesson. No, you will seek occasion so as again to be in terror, again to face ruin, O you slave many times over! But what beast, having once burst its bonds and escaped, perversely returned to them again?). The text is from Horace, "Satires", Book II, 7, lines 68-71.

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. 72, no. 124.

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