Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Mortis formido

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

7 7/16 x 5 15/16 inches (190 x 150 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 34

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, "Mortis formido (title) / Districtús ensis cúi súper impiâ / Cervice pendet non siculae dapes / Dulcem elaborabunt saporem / Non aviúm citharaeque cantus / Somnúm redúcent, somnus agrestium / Lenis virorúm non humiles domos / Fastidit, úmbrosamqúe ripam / Non Zephyris agitata Tempe" (Over whose impious head the drawn sword hangs, for him Sicilian feasts will produce no savory sweet, nor will the music of birds or lutes bring back sleep to his couch. Soft slumber scorns not the humble cottage peasant, nor the shady bank, nor the valley by the zephyrs fanned). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book III, 1, lines 17-24.

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. 78, no. 146.

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