Otto van Veen

Image not available

Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Amicitiam fovet munificentia

Brush and light brown 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 7/8 inches (182 x 149 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 55

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, "Amicitiam fovet munificentia (title)/ __ si cognatos núllo natura labore/ Qúos tibi dat retinere velis, servareque amicos/ Infelix operam perdas: út si quis asellum/ In campum doceat parentum cúrrere frenis" (When nature gives you kinsfolk without a trouble, if you sought to hold and keep their love, would it be as fruitless a waste of effort, as if one were to train an ass to race upon the Campus obedient to the rein?). The text is from Horace, "Satires, Book I, 1, lines 88-91.

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. 84, no. 167.

Catalog link:

See more information »

Artist page:

School:

Century:

Classification:

Department: