Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Volat irrevocabile tempus

Brush and off-white opaque watercolor, 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.

7 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches (181 x 146 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 100

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:

irrevocabile tempús (title) / Immortalia ne speres monet annus, at almúm / Qúae rapit hora diem. / Frigora mitescúnt Zephyris, ver proterit Aestas / Interitúra simúl / Pomifer Aútúmnús frúges effuderit, et mox, Brúma recúrrit iners" (The year and hour that rob us of the gracious day warn thee not to hope for unending joys. The cold gives way before the zephyrs; spring is trampled and underfoot by summer, destined likewise to pass away so soon as fruitful autumn has poured forth its harvest; and lifeless winter soon returns again). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book IV, 7, lines 7-12.

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. 98, no. 212.

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