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).
Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Incipiendúm aliquando (title) / Dimidiúm facti qúi coepit habet; sapere aúde. / Incipe, vivendi rectè qúi progorat horam / Rustìcús expectat, dúm defluat amnis, at ille / Labitúr et labetur in omne volúbilis aevúm" (Well begun is half done; dare to be wise; begin! He who puts off the hour of right living is like the bumpkin waiting for the river to run out; yet it glides, and on it will glide, rolling its flood forever). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 2, lines 40-43.
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. 126.