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).
Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Heres instar vúltúris esse solet (title) _____ anús improba Thebis/ Ex testamento sic est elata, cadaver/ Únctúm oleo largo, núdis húmeris tulit heres,/ Scilicet elabi si posset mortúa, credo/ Quod nimiúm institerat viventi" (A wicked old crone at Thebes, by terms of her will, was buried thus: her corpse, well oiled, her heir carried on her bare shoulders. She wanted, of course, to see whether she could give him the slip when dead. I suppose, when she was living, he had borne too hard upon her). The text is from Horace, "Satires", Book II, 5, lines 84-88.
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. 86-87, no. 175.