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Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

In quocumque vitae genere philosophari licet

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629

In quocumque vitae genere philosophari licet

7 1/8 x 5 13/16 inches (181 x 147 mm)
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.
Van Veen Album, folio 72

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).
Inscriptions/Markings
Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "In quocumqúe vitae genere philosophari licet (title) / Si pranderet olús patienter, Regibús uti / Nollet Aristippús, si sciret Regibus uti / Fastidiret olus qúi me notat" (If Aristippus could be content to dine on greens, he would not want to live with princes. If he who knew how to live with princes, he would sniff at greens). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 17, lines 13-15.
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. 89, no. 184.
Classification
Century Drawings
School
Department