Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

A poculis absint seria

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 1/16 x 5 13/16 inches (178 x 149 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 29

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, "A pocúlis absint seria (title) / Discit non inter lances mesasque nitentes / Cum stupet insanis acies fulgoribús, et cúm / Acclivis falsis animus meliora recúsat / Verúm hic impransi mecúm disquirite, cúr hoc / Dicam si potero, malè verúm examinat omnis / Corrúptús júdex" (Learn I say, not amid the tables' shining dishes, when the eye is dazed by senseless splendour, and the mind, turning to vanities, rejects the better part; but here, before we dine, let us discuss the point together. "Why so?" I will tell you, if I can. Every judge who has been bribed weighs truth badly). The text is from Horace, "Satires", Book II, 2, lines 4-9.

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. 76-77, no. 141.

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