Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Cuique suum studium
Brush and off-white opaque watercolor, 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.
7 3/16 x 5 3/4 inches (182 x 146 mm)
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.
Van Veen Album, folio 70
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, "Cúiqúe súúm stúdiúm (title)/ Qúam scit úterque libens, censebo exerceat artem" (What I shall advise is that each contentedly practice the trade he understands). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 14, line 44. Another quotation from Horace, "Epistles", is cited in the 1607 and 1609 "Emblemata": "Navem agere ignarus navis timet: abrotanum aegro/ Non audet, nisi qui didicit, dare. Quod medicorum est/ Promittunt medici, tractant fabrilia fabri" (A man who knows nothing of a ship fears to handle one; no one dares to give southernwood to the sick unless he has learnt its use; doctors undertake a doctor's work; carpenters handle carpenters' tools). "Epistles", Book II, 1, lines 114-16.

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. 89, no. 182

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