Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Frugalitatis exemplar

Pen and black ink, with gray wash, and some work in point of brush, on unprepared paper.

7 1/2 x 6 1/16 inches (191 x 154 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 103

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, "Frúgalitatis exemplar (title)/ Vivitúr parvo benè, cúi paternúm/ Splendet in mensâ tenúi salinúm/ Nec leves somnos, timor aút cúpido/ Sordidus aúfert" (He lives happily upon a little on whose frugal board gleams the ancestral salt-dish, and whose soft slumbers are not banished by fear or sordid greed). Horace, "Odes", Book II, 16, lines 13-16; not from Book IV, as cited in the 1607 "Emblemata".

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:

Stampfle, Felice, with the assistance of Ruth S. Kraemer and Jane Shoaf Turner. Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries and Flemish Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1991, p. 99, no. 215.

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