Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Sua nemo sorte contentus

Brush and gray and light brown 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 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches (181 x 146 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 71

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, "Súa nemo sorte contentus (title) / Optat ephippia bos piger, optat arare caballus, / Cui placet alterius, sua nimirum est odio sors" (The ox longs for the horse's trappings: the horse when lazy, longs to plough. One who likes another's lot, of course dislikes his own). The first line is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 14, line 11. The title is a familiar proverb.

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. 183.

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