3. Tulipomania

Monday

Tulipmania and the Dutch Golden Age

With strange perfumes he did the roses taint,
And flow’rs themselves were taught to paint.
The tulip, white, did for complexion seek,
And learn’d to interline its cheek;
Its onion root they then so high did hold,
That one was for a meadow sold.
(Andrew Marvell, The Mower Against Gardens)

Jean Joseph-Xavier Bidauld

There was a moment in the 17th century when Europe went mad - for tulips, elegant Turkish wildflowers with a smooth, green stem, with an exceptional capacity for mutation, infinitely changing their shape.

SAMUEL VAN HOOGSTRATEN, Portrait of Johan Cornelisz. Vijgeboom and His Wife, 1647

There were numerous types of tulips: cup-shaped, bright colored or ranging from jewel tones to pastel shades, with feathery petals, or with petals that are either twisted, curled or waved. The tulip images were embroidered on dresses and woven into tapestries, painted in a great number of still lifes. The archives of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome contain glorious pictures of tulips along with samples of Renaissance silk, the 17th century books, the lists of indulgences sold in Germany.

Ambrosius Bosschaert, Flowers in a Vase, 1606

Transported from Turkey as bulbs, then passed on to the Dutch middlemen, tulips set in the European gardens. Tulip mania gripped all of Europe, infecting even the poorest people and not just the Dutch Republic. Mike Dash mentions in his book “Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused” "...the personalities involved in the creation of the tulip market, such as the orphans who made a fortune selling their late father's tulip bulbs and the man who owned a dozen extremely rare bulbs and wouldn't part with them at any price.”
"...the Fuggers, the fabulously rich Bavarian family of bankers who were to the 15th century what the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were to the 20th... were growing tulips in Augsburg by the beginning of the 1570s.
"There were tulips in Vienna by 1572. They were in Frankfurt by 1593, and they reached the south of france by 1598.. Bulbs were sent to England as early as 1582, where they were soon grown in great quantity."

Balthasar van der Ast, Fruchtkorb (1632)

The price for tulips rose continually to vertiginous heights for 40 years in the early 17th century.
“At the height of the Tulipmania in November 1636, a single bulb of the legendary Semper augustus variety fetched the equivalent of 10 years' wages for the average worker; a couple of Viceroy bulbs cost the equivalent of an Amsterdam canal house. One unfortunate foreign sailor made himself rather unpopular with his employer by slicing up what he thought was an onion as a garnish for his herring. An English amateur botanist, intrigued by an unknown bulb lying in his host's conservatory, proceeded to dissect it, and was put in jail until he could raise an astronomical 4000 guilders.” (Lonely Planet Amsterdam By Karla Zimmerman, Caroline Sieg, Ryan Ver Berkmoes).

Dutch town in the 17th century

"... a representative calculation of the present-day price paid for a single Viceroy tulip bulb
during 1635, near the height of the tulipomania in Holland, totals a whopping $34,584. Therefore,Mackay's example of individual tulip bulbs fetching anywhere from 1,260-5,500 florins implies a present-day price range from $17,430 to $76,085 each." (Mark Hirschey, “How Much is a Tulip Worth?” Financial Analysts Journal, vol. 54, no. 4 (July/August 1998): 11-1; web.ku.edu/~finmhir/documents/Hirschey_TulipWorth.pdf)

JAN BAPTIST VAN FORNENBURGH

The guilder (the name has often been interchangeable with florin) was the basic unit of currency in the Dutch Republic, which was made up of 20 stuivers.

Mike Dash in his book Tulipomania gives a note on prices:

Interestingly, the tulip traders were generally called “florists”, and sometimes, the most qualified dealers, were known as “liefhebber” - lover, as the flowers were for them more than a merchandise, but objects of passion and expertise.

AMBROSIUS THE YOUNGER BOSSCHAERT 1627

In the prosperous Golden Age the expanding commerce had brought unprecedented welfare to the Dutch society along with sophisticated new tastes and new temptations. The tulip trader’s passion for rare flowers extended to other wonders of nature and human artistry - they also had been trading carved coral, gemstones, paintings, marbled paper, ostrich eggs and dogs, importing spices and silks from the far ends of the earth and then distributing them to the rest of Europe.

JAN DAVIDSZ DE HEEM Festoon with Flowers and Fruits 1670

The prices collapsed practically overnight in February 1637, ruining lives - the legend has it that Dutchmen merchants drowned themselves out of despair in the canals of Amsterdam and Haarlem.

Anne Goldgar, however, tells a different story in her book Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. She informs us that the tulip merchants were generally groups of rich people, men and women, who also carried on a stable trade in other commodities (a silk merchant was said to have made more than 20,000 on tulips in one year).

Jan van Kessel, Still Life

They were linked to each other by religion, marriage and trade, with spare money to invest. In Haarlem archives she found the records indicating that most of the tulip traders, active in 1637, had carried on trade business years after the crash - “..Pieter Wynants, a prosperous Haarlem merchant and manufacturer of linen cloth snd thread, had 40,000 to leave to his children when he made a codicil to his will in 1641 (reflecting an increase from 30 in his will in 1638)”. The market just stabilized with more reasonable prices for tulip bulbs.

Saskia as Flora, REMBRANDT, 1634

She also mentions that an average laborer at the time had more important things to worry about than bulb trade as the region had been steeped in military conflict for years and the plague aftermath two years earlier which had killed 135,000 inhabitants of Amsterdam.

Tulip by Balthasar van der Ast

The real damage, Goldgar claims, was more personal. The traders were friends and neighbors; many were members of the close-knit Mennonite community. They bought and sold flowers on a market that functioned because a man's word was his bond. After the crash, however, buyers refused to make good on promises to pay. Suddenly, friends questioned one another's honor. In response, lawsuits were filed—but for slander rather than nonpayment. Dutch pamphleteers, who believed they were witnessing the breakdown of the social order, proclaimed the arrival of the Apocalypse. Fortunately, they were wrong, and a hundred years later there was a new mania to bemoan: the hyacinth.

(newsweek.com/2007/07/15/a-flood-of-flowers.html)

Painting by Frans Hals

Fun Facts:
An English botanist, John Parkinson (1567–1650) mentions the tulips could be mashed into red wine and drunk as a cure for "a cricke in the nicke." (Mike Dash, Tulipomania)

8K+Salvează

Painting by Frans Hals

Tulip Vase by Dutch Unknown Potter

Tulip vase with the arms of Willem III, 1690s

Tulip Vase, Qung dynasty

Crispijn van de Passe Spring Garden, from Hortus Floridus, published 1614-15

Tulip Vase, Delft, c 1720

Late Qing dynasty (1644-1912)

Tulip Pulpit by Hans Witten, Freiberg Cathedral, Saxony

8K

Abraham Minon, 1660s

2. Tulipomania

Tulipomania: A Tale of Obsession, Greed and Flowers

01.08.2018

Words by

Lucy Munro

• Issue 54
• Botanica
• Culture

Of the many strange and compelling stories of the classical world, few have held my fascination like the Tulipomania of the Dutch Golden Age. Driven by greed, lust and an obsessive desire for possession, a tulip flavoured frenzy of mass proportions swept the country, with some individuals paying the equivalent cost of a large house on Amsterdam’s most exclusive street to claim their right to one single bloom. Yet, as quickly as the whole commotion had begun it catapulted to a sudden halt, leaving a trail of broken hearts and debts in its wake. How did this brief blooming bulb from the Himalayan mountain ranges find its way to the heart of Dutch society and into the hands of the rich and wealthy?

Tulipa spp. are native to the mountainous highlands of Central Asia and parts of Southern Europe, where they can still be found today growing wild in spring. The bulbs require a particular climate – they need minus degree temperatures during winter dormancy for their blooms to set and warm temperate days during flowering. For an unsuspecting traveller wandering the trade route from Constantinople during the 16thC, the magnificence of a mountainside blanketed by wild tulips in flower must have been an impressive sight. The bulbs were soon retrieved from the earth and taken back to the capital as a gift for the sultan.

Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566), the sultan who reigned during the rise of the Ottoman Empire, was infatuated by tulips, ordering the bulbs to be planted, grown and cultivated in the palace gardens. Aside from being drawn to the ephemeral beauty of the flower, the tulip resonated with the Ottomans – its symmetrical 6-petal structure physically similar to the turbans styled by the men and the shape of the word Allah in Arabic script resembling a tulip in bloom. The bulbs became central to the visual language of Islamic culture, with tulip illustrations decorating the walls and ceilings of mosques and temples. This fascination continued in the following centuries, with the period of 1718-1730 known as the Tulip Era. Annual tulip illuminations were celebrated each night during the spring blooming period and Sultan Ahmed III (1703-1730), known as the Tulip King, enforced laws that decreed the sale of tulips outside of Constantinople punishable by exile.

The Blue Mosque in Istanbul is covered with more than 20,000 handmade ceramic 17th C Iznik tiles in more than fifty different tulip designs. Image by Dennis Jarvis

Tulip bulbs were occasionally gifted to foreign ambassadors visiting the East, which is how the plant found its way across the continent and into the dirt stained hands of Carlolus Clusius, a world-renowned botanist who was working at the time as the head of the Royal Medicinal Gardens in Prague. In 1593, Clusius was appointed the director of the Hortus Academicus botanical garden at the University of Leiden, and the tulip bulbs were amongst the plants he selected to relocate to his new workplace. The tulips soon thrived in the Leiden climate, and the Dutch, who had only seen illustrations of the elusive blooms before then, were instantly enchanted by the bulb, with word quickly spreading across the country of the flower’s magnificence.

Under the cover of darkness, Clusius’ tulip bulbs mysteriously began disappearing. Before long, the who’s who of Dutch society were either hankering to get their hands on their own tulip bulb or flashing a bloom or two from the windows of their homes. Tulipomania had officially begun.”

It’s worth noting at this stage of the story that the arrival of Clusius and his tulips couldn’t have happened at a better time for the Dutch. The 16th and 17th centuries was a period of great wealth and prosperity in the region, with the era later dubbed the Dutch Golden Age. Years of fighting the Eighty Year War against the Spanish had ceased and the Dutch Republic was unified; The Dutch East India Company was founded, increasing economy and bringing oriental trade; migrations of skilled Protestant workers created better industry; and an intellectually tolerant climate beckoned scientists, philosophers, artists, creators and thinkers acclaimed as the best in their fields to the cities. People had cash to spend, an eye for beauty and a society to show it off to. In other words, the climate was ripe for a flower frenzy to begin.

A symbol of wealth and luxury, the tulip became an overnight sensation, with buyers and traders bargaining for ownership of the blooms that were auctioned off at taverns across the city. The only problem was the bulb’s short blooming period – tulips usually only flower for around seven days in early spring, and if they are to flower again the next year, they must be allowed to wilt and decay back into the earth from where they began. Doing so creates duplicate bulbs beneath the earth, passing on the genetic structures of the parent plant to the newly multiplied bulbs. Growing from seed is possible, however this method is much slower, taking many years before flowering. Not to be deterred from their game, the wealthy traders soon found a way around this, drawing up contracts for the ownership of future flowers, speculating on the success of next year’s blooms and allowing different individuals to own the bulb at its different stages. When the bulbs were dormant, they were dug up and handed from the current owner to the future owner who would then pass on the bulb to the next future owner in the following dormant period, so on so forth. Ownership contracts were obsessively swapped, traded and on-sold multiple times throughout the year, the buyers playing the tulip stock exchange.

Satire on Tulip Mania, Jan Brueghel the Younger, c. 1640.

Still life of variegated tulips in a ceramic vase, with a wasp, a dragonfly, a butterfly and a lizard by Baltus van der Ast, 1625.

Although common varieties and single colours grew increasingly in value, it was the extremely rare broken tulips that were most sought after, their variegated petals especially magnificent. Unbeknownst at the time, these tulips were infected with a mosaic virus that mutated the cell structure of the flower, causing the spectacularly coloured patterns. Although beautiful, this virus weakened the bulb and would eventually lead to its premature death.

Of the broken tulips, the Semper Augustus, with its red and white striped petals, was the crème de la crème of the crop. In 1633 a buyer paid 5500 guilders for its bulb and by 1637, the bulb was worth twice that amount. Historian Mike Dash wrote of the payments in his historical account, Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused: ‘It was enough to feed, clothe and house a whole Dutch family for half a lifetime, or sufficient to purchase one of the grandest homes on the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam for cash, complete with a coach house and an 80-ft garden – and this at a time when homes in that city were as expensive as property anywhere in the world.’

At the peak of tulip mania in 1636, possessing a tulip was the ultimate status symbol in Dutch society – a vase at the window overlooking the street or a bloom pinned into the buttonhole of a dress, a silent reminder of the opulence of its owner.”

Great painters of the time captured still life floral arrangements of tulips and portaits of wives with cut flowers perched in their fingertips. It would seem that the infatuation with the blooms would only continue to grow, but spectacularly in 1637, an auction in Harlem failed to draw a single buyer. Overnight, the tulip market had collapsed.

Those in possession of future bulb contracts scrambled to sell-on before losses were too high, and those owed money began knocking on the doors of the debtors. Requests for the government to step in to resolve the frenzy were largely ignored, with the businessman, who were mostly from the upper classes, left to work out the situation amongst themselves. Though the effects of the tulip mania market crash had no immediate effects on the economic stability of the country or its position as a leading Western power, the tulip fell spectacularly out of fashion for a time, its bloom a sore reminder of the game that many had played and lost.

In the Netherlands today, the charm of the tulip has been restored, with people once again enchanted by its blooms. No longer though, is this a sport for the wealthy alone, with street side vendors peppered amongst city streets selling carts of bulbs in every colour, pattern and variety for the cost of breadcrumbs. Each Spring, millions of tourists pour into the country to witness the mass plantings of tulips emerging from the earth, delighted by the colour and elegance of the blooms. It’s a tulip mania of a different kind this time.

_

Semper Augustus tulip, the bloom worth the cost of the most expensive house on the most exclusive street in Amsterdam.

Tulips for sale in the Netherlands today.