Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Habenda imprimis animi cura

Brush and light brown gray oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a reddish brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium.

7 1/8 x 5 7/8 inches (181 x 149 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 24

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, "Habenda imprimis animi cura (title)/ Qúa laedunt oculos festinas demere/ Est animúm differs curandi tempus in omne" (Why indeed are you in a hurry to remove things which hurt the eye, while if aught is eating into your soul, you put off the time for cure till next year?). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 2, lines 38-39.

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. 75, no. 136.

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