Image not available
Otto van Veen
1556-1629
In medio consistit virtus
7 3/16 x 5 3/4 inches (182 x 147 mm)
Brush and white opaque watercolor, 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.
Van Veen Album, folio 5
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.
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).
Engraved in reverse, 1607.
Also see records on Van Veen Album (III, 146-157).
Inscriptions/Markings
Inscribed by the artist, within the design below the three figures of the composition, in brown ink, "Prodigalitas, Liberalitas, Auaritia". On the album page below the design in another hand, in brown ink, "In medio consistit virtus (title) / Virtús est mediúm vitiorúm in útrimque reductum" (Virtue is a mean between vices, remote from both extremes). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 18, line 9.
Bibliography
Stampfle, Felice, with the assistance of Ruth S. Kraemer and Jane Shoaf Turner. Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries and Flemish Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1991, p. 70, no. 117.
Artist
Classification
Century Drawings
School
Catalog link
Department