Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Nihil silentio utilius
Brush and light brown 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 (181 x 146 mm)
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.
Van Veen Album, folio 28
Notes: 

Watermark: since the drawings are laid down, no watermarks, if any, are visible, even with fiber-optic light.
Also see records on Van Veen Album (III, 146-157).
Engraved in reverse, 1607.

Inscription: 

Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink: "Nihil silentio útiliús (title)/ Est et fideli túta silentio, merces./ Arcanum neqúe tú scrútaberis úlliús unquam,/ Commissumque teges, et vino tortus et ira"(There is a sure reward for trusty silence, too. You will never pry into your patron's secrets, and if one is entrusted to you, you will keep it, though wine or anger puts you on the rack). The first line is from Horace, "Odes", Book III, 2, lines 25-26. The last two lines are from Horace, Epistles, Book I, 18, lines 37-38.

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. 76, no. 140.

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