Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

De futuris ne sis anxius

Brush and gray and light brown oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium; incised with the stylus.

7 1/8 x 5 7/8 inches (181 x 148 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 90

Notes:

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

Inscription:

Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "De fúturis ne sis anxius (title)/ Prúdens fútúri temporis exitúm./ Caliginosa nocte premit Deus,/ Ridetque, si mortalis últrà/ Fas trepidat" (With wise purpose does the god bury in the shades of night the future's outcome, and laughs if mortals be anxious beyond due limits). The text is from Horace,"Odes", Book III, 29, lines 29-32.

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. 95, no. 202.

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