Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Domi argus, foris talpa

Brush and gray and 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 3/4 inches (181 x 145 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 69

Notes:

Watermark: Since the drawings are laid down, no watermarks, if any, are visible, even with fiber-optic light.
Engraved on reverse, 1607, p. 145.
Also see records on Van Veen Album (III, 146-157).

Inscription:

Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Domi argús foris talpa (title)/ Cúm túa pervideas ocúlis mala lippús inúnctis/ Cur in amicorúm vitiis tam cernis acútúm/ Qúam út aquila aút serpens Epidaúriús at tibi contra/ Evenit, inqúirant vitia in túa rúrsús et illi" (When you look over your own sins, your eyes are rheumy and daubed with ointment; why, when you view the failings of your friends, are you as keen of sight as an eagle or as a serpent of Epidaurus?). The text is from Horace, "Satires", Book I, 3, lines 25-28.

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. 88, no. 181.

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