Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Sors sua quemque beat

Brush and light brown and gray oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a dark brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium.

7 1/8 x 5 11/16 inches (181 x 145 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 40

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, "Sors súa quemqúe beat (title) / Non possidentem múlta vocaveris / Rectè beatam, rectiús occúpat / Nomen beati, qui Divorúm / Muneribús / sapienter uti, / Dúramqúe callet paúperiem pati, / Pejúsqúe leto flagitiúm timet / Non ille pro caris amicis / Aút patria timidus perire" (Not him who possesses much, would one rightly call the happy man; he more fitly gains that name who knows how to use with wisdom the blessings of the gods, to endure hard poverty, and who fears dishonor worse than death, not afraid to die for cherished friends or fatherland). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book IV, 9, lines 45-52.

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. 80, no. 152.

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