Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Culmen honoris lubricum
Brush and gray and light brown 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 3/16 x 5 3/4 inches (182 x 146 mm)
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.
Van Veen Album, folio 46
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, "Culmen honoris lubricúm (title)/ Auream qúisqúis mediocritatem/ Deligit, tútús caret obsoleti/ Sordibus tecti, caret invidenda/ Sobriús aúla./ Saepiús ventis agitatur ingens/ Pinús, et celsae graviore casú/ Decidúnt túrres, feriúntque súmmos/ fúlmina montes" (Who so cherishes the golden mean, safely avoids the foulness of an ill-kept house and discreetly, too, avoids a hall exciting envy. 'Tis oftener the tall pine that is shaken by the wind; 'tis the lofty towers that fall with the heavier crash, and 'tis the tops of the mountains that the lightening strikes). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book II, 10, lines 5-12.

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. 81, no. 158.

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