Otto van Veen

Image not available

Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Frugalitatis exemplar

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

7 3/16 x 5 13/16 inches (183 x 147 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 35

Notes:

Watermark: since the drawings are laid down, no watermarks, if any, are visible, even with fiber-optic light.
This is apparently an early version of the subject, perhaps unfinished, which was superseded by Folio 103, the drawing at the very end of the album.
Also see records on Van Veen Album (III, 146-157).

Inscription:

Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Frúgalitatis exemplar (title)/ Vivitúr parvo benè, cúi paternúm/ Splendet in mensâ tenúi salinúm/ Nec leves somnos, timor aút capico/ Sordidus aúfert" (He lives happily upon a little on whose frugal board gleams the ancestral salt-dish, and whose soft slumbers are not banished by fear or sordid greed). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book II, 16, lines 13-16; not from Book IV, as cited in the 1607 "Emblemata".

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. 147.

Catalog link:

See more information »

Artist page:

School:

Century:

Classification:

Department: