Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Stultitiam patiuntur opes
Brush and off-white opaque watercolor, 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 3/4 inches (181 x 145 mm)
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.
Van Veen Album, folio 58
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, "Stúltitiam patiúntúr opes (title) / Plútús divitiarúm Deus a Stúltitia cúcúllo indúitur, Divites / enim impúnè agúnt, at è contrâ. / Paúper amet caútè, timeat maledicere pauper" (Plutus, the god of riches, is being crowned with a fool's cap by Folly. The rich indeed can do anything with impunity; but on the other hand, let the poor man love with caution; let the poor man fear to speak harshly). The title is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 18, line 29; the last line is from Ovid, "The Art of Love", Book II, line 167. The source of the lines in between has not been identified.

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. 85, no. 170.

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