Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Communis ad Letum via

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 3/16 x 5 3/4 inches (183 x 145 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 96

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, "Commúnis ad letúm via (title) / Charontis únda scilicet omnibus/ Qúicúqúe terrae múnere vescimúr/ Enaviganda, sive Reges/ Sive inopes erimús coloni (Charon's stream that surely must be crossed by all of us who feed upon Earth's bounty, be we princes or needy husbandsmen). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book II, 14, lines 7-12: "Plutona tauris/ qui ter amplum/ Geryonem Tityonque tristi/ compescit unda, scilicet omnibus, / quicumque terrae munere vescimur,/ enaviganda, sive reges/ sive inopes erimus coloni" (Pluto, who imprisons Geryon of triple fame and Tityos, by the gloomy stream that surely must be crossed by all of us who feed upon Earth's bounty, be we princes or needy husbandmen).

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. 97, no. 208.

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