Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Virtutis gloria

Brush and gray oil, and pen and brown ink, with brown wash; 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 1/16 x 5 7/8 inches (180 x 148 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 2

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, "Virtútis gloria (title) / Res gerere et captos ostendere civibus hostes / attingit soliúm Jovis et caelestia tentat" (To achive great deeds and to display captive foemen to one's fellow citizens is to touch the throne of Jove and to scale the skies). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 17, lines 33-34.

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. 69, no. 114.

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