Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Agriculturae beatitudo

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 13/16 inches (182 x 148 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 41

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, "Agricúltúrae beatitúdo (title) / Beatús ille qúi procúl negociis / ut prisca gens mortaliúm / Paterna rúra bobús exercet suis, / Solutus omni foenore / Nec exitatúr classico miles truci, / Nec horret iratum mare, / Forúmque vitat et superba civium / Potentiorúm limina" (Happy the man who, far away from business cares, like the pristine race of mortals, works his ancestral acres with his steers, from all money lending free; who is not, as a soldier, roused by the wild clarion, nor dreads the angry sea; he avoids the Forum and proud thresholds of more powerful citizens). The text is from Horace, "Epode 2", lines 1-8.

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. 80, no. 153.

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