by Anna Pavord
Emmanuel Sweert (c1552–1612) was only one of those who had businesses in Amsterdam selling curiosities – shells and stuffed birds as well as seeds and tulip bulbs. Already Dutch traders were trying to corner the market in tulips, by buying in bulbs from Flanders and France to pass on to well-heeled customers. Sweert described himself as gardener to Rudolph II and supplied plants to the courts at both Vienna and Prague as well as to Dutch gardeners. His nursery catalogue, the Florilegium of 1612, followed the early herbals in giving each tulip a long Latin tag; Latin confirmed status, reinforced respectability. His red and yellow striped tulips labelled ‘Tulipa lutea rubris flamulis latis’ and the like would soon acquire more comfortable varietal names – ‘Lak van Rhijn’ or ‘Admiral van Hoorn’. Tulips were the first flowers to acquire such names and in The Netherlands, where royalty had gone out of favour, they were more generally christened as admirals and generals than the kings and queens of French-born tulips. The names did not commemorate real admirals and generals: ‘General Bol’ was named after the tulip grower Pieter Bol of Haarlem and ‘Admiral Pottebacker’ glorified plain Henrik Pottebacker of Gouda. New seedling varieties were often called ‘conquests’, as in ‘Conquest van Royen’.
As early as 1614, writers were making fun of those who spent extravagant amounts of money on the tulip bulbs offered by traders such as Sweert. ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’ is the motto above a Claes Jansz engraving of two tulips in Roemer Visscher’s Sinnepoppen published in Amsterdam that year. But catalogues of expensive novelties continued to be produced, countered by yet more moralising tracts railing against the dangers of worldly indulgence. Indulgence was the prime concern of Crispyn de Passe the Younger’s (1594–1670) Hortus Floridus of 1614, an anthology of engravings of common garden plants that nurserymen could use to whet customers’ appetites for their wares. In effect, these were classy advertisements, point-of-sale materials as marketing men call them now. In the dark days of October and November, when bulbs went on sale, potential customers needed a vision of what was packed inside these implausible, foreign bulb-bundles and de Passe gave it to them. The compilation was a best-seller – in seventeenth-century terms – and around 1617, a twelve-page supplement was added to the original anthology, with twenty tulips illustrated in magnificent detail. One species tulip, T. saxatilis, appears among the illustrations, which mostly show striped and mottled tulips, still with the sharply pointed petals characteristic of the first imports from Turkey. De Passe included the double tulip ‘Iacobi Bommii’; a device remarkably like a modern Link-Stake holds the bloom upright, and braces it against attack by a stripy bee which is homing in on it with all the concentrated attention of a kamikaze pilot. In his work, de Passe included names of liefhebbers or tulip growers throughout northern Europe: Abraham de Goyer, Volckert Cornhert and nine more in Amsterdam, together with others from Delft, Rotterdam, The Hague (where the painter and draughtsman Jacques de Gheyn appears on de Passe’s list), Gouda, Utrecht and Haarlem. The biggest group of growers is listed at Brussels, with further growers at Antwerp, Frankfurt (home of the engraver and publisher Johannes de Bry), Valenciennes, Prague and Strasbourg where the Comte de Rapstijn was one of de Passe’s contacts.
Heavy-footed tracts were no match against the jewel-like beauties de Passe laid out so temptingly, but the moralists thundered on:
All these fools want is tulip bulbs
Heads and hearts have but one wish
Let’s try and eat them; it will make us laugh
To taste how bitter is that dish.1
That was the kind of thing that the congregation at Terneuzen in Zeeland could expect to hear from the pulpit, where Petrus Hondius (1578–1621) was pastor. Only the most devoted of the pastor’s flock, though, could have been expected to struggle through to the end of his poem, 16,000 verses in all.
Despite such denunciations, tulip prices continued to rise inexorably. By 1623 the fabled flower ‘Semper Augustus’ was already selling for 1,000 florins a bulb (the average annual income was about 150 florins). The stock of it was jealously guarded by the Grand Pensionary of Amsterdam, Dr Adriaen Pauw, who grew nothing but ‘Semper Augustus’ on his estate in Heemstede. ‘Among the many Precious examples of these Flowers’ wrote the chronicler Nicolas Wassenaer, ‘…one that for its beauty is named Semper Augustus is the foremost of this Year. The colour is white, with Carmine on a blue base, and with an unbroken flame right to the top. Never did a Florist see one more beautiful than this…’2 ‘Semper Augustus’ held its price over a long period, so it must have been a break that was slow to produce offsets. In 1624 only twelve bulbs of the variety were known to exist, valued at 1,200 florins each; by 1625 the asking price had more than doubled. By 1633 though, estimates of 5,500 florins were floating round each bulb, almost doubling to 10,000 florins at the height of the tulipomania. The highest price ever asked for ‘Semper Augustus’ was noted in the Nederlandsch Magazijn of 1838 where the writer quoted a price of 13,000 florins for a single bulb, more than the cost of the most expensive houses on the canals at the centre of Amsterdam. In the mid seventeenth century you could have picked up such a house, complete with gardens and coach house for about 10,000 florins.
From the early seventeenth century onwards, tulips flourished not only in gardens but on furniture, embroideries, and especially tiles. In a low-lying country like Holland where damp was a permanent problem, lime plaster deteriorated fast and tiles made more practical wall coverings. The technique of tile-making, first developed by Ottoman manufacturers at Iznik in the second half of the fifteenth century, had gradually travelled west, through Spain and Italy, into The Netherlands and a whole pattern book of Ottoman motifs, stylised fruit such as pomegranates and grapes, equally stylised flowers (most commonly carnations and tulips) travelled west too.3
Delft was only one of the cities of the northern Netherlands where tile-making flourished; Amsterdam, Gouda, Harlingen, Hoorn, Makkum, Middelburg, Rotterdam and Utrecht all produced their own tiles, though similar patterns and designs were used in all the centres. The first tulips appeared on tiles around 1610, the flowers often accompanied by fruit such as pomegranates and grapes. By 1620, the tulip was being used as a motif on its own, the tile-makers influenced perhaps by illustrations in books such as Crispyn de Passe’s Hortus Floridus. Gradually, a standard three-tulip design emerged which was used until well into the nineteenth century. Sometimes tulips are shown in cross-section, with a stylised stamen and pistil, another trick borrowed from the illustrators of botanical books. In terms of colour, the tile-makers were more limited than the illustrators. They did not have such a wide palette to use in the first place and the colours changed when the tiles were fired. Despite this, wonderfully subtle effects were achieved, the tile-makers sometimes producing multi-coloured, life-sized tulips that stretched over two tiles. The flowers mirrored the most desirable colour combinations of the time: brown and white, mustard with brown and white, purple with brown and white, dark red and white and yellow with brown and white.4 Gradually these polychrome tiles gave way to simpler blue and white versions, imitating the Chinese porcelain that was being imported by companies such as the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie. A gallery of Chinese motifs was added to the tulips and carnations that still featured heavily on these blue and white tile panels. Flamed and feathered tulips were way beyond the means of ordinary people; tulips on tiles were a cheaper option.
So were tulips painted in flower pieces by such masters as Ambrosius Bosschaert, Jan Brueghel and Roelandt Savery. Any flower piece worthy of the name had at least three tulips in the arrangement, surrounded by rare columbines, iris, jonquils and fritillaries. Even if you paid top prices for the best artist, you could still, in the 1630s, get a bunch of painted flowers for a fraction of what it would cost to put together the same arrangement of real flowers in your garden. Dutch and Flemish painters flourished in the seventeenth century because prosperous citizens and merchants could afford to buy their work. For the rich, this was a golden
time in The Netherlands, like Athens in the time of Pericles, or Italy under the Medicis. Art blossomed under the patronage of those whom trade had enriched. ‘Paintings were everywhere: in the town hall and other public places, in orphanages and offices, in the houses of patricians and burghers alike.’5 The popularity of flower-painting mirrored a growing interest in botany; the flourishing trade in tulips stimulated it further. Never have flowers figured more prominently in the lives of ordinary people than they did in Holland in the first decades of the seventeenth century.
Dr Paul Taylor, an authority on Dutch flower-painting of this period, charts four distinct periods in the development of the flower piece. The first age (1600–1620) encompasses artists such as Jacques de Gheyn, Ambrosius Bosschaert, Jan Brueghel and Roelandt Savery. Their bouquets are centrally placed in the frame. The paintings are symmetrical, detailed, accurate, almost scientific. The flowers are perfect, each blossom clearly displayed. These are records, early seventeenth-century mementos, of highly prized possessions. The second epoch (1620–1650) includes artists such as Bosschaert’s brother-in-law, Balthasar van der Ast, Jacob Marrell and Anthony Claesz. After the trauma of tulipomania, flowers were increasingly used as symbols of human vanitas and the transience of all earthly delights. This transitional period led to the era (1650–1720) of Simon Verelst, Rachel Ruysch and Jan Davidsz de Heem, who specialised in arrangements of flowers set against dramatically dark backgrounds. Finally (1720–1750) came Jan van Huysum whose elaborate compositions brought flower paintings of the Golden Age to a peak of perfection.6
That is the art historian’s analysis, but tulip fanciers can chart a different progression as the tulip, often a pivotal element in these flower pieces, began itself to change. Paintings by Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573–1621) such as Flowers in a Rummer,7 Glass Vase with Four Tulips8 and Flower Piece9 show neat, bulbous-shaped tulips with pointed petals, like the flowers of Sweert’s Florilegium, though more believable. The petals flip out at the top from a narrow waist and show a tendency to curl in on themselves. The inside of the flower, so important later to the English florists, is rarely shown. The markings of the petals are minutely recorded. Each is different: bright yellow, streaked with red, white delicately feathered in red, and in the foreground of the Glass Vase with Four Tulips, a superb tulip of red and white stripes. Occasionally among these gaudy varieties, a much simpler tulip appears, as in the Vase of Flowers10 by Jan Brueghel (1568–1625). Under the extraordinary tri-colour double tulip with a butterfly perched on it is a modest little apricot flower, very like T. batalinii ‘Apricot Jewel’.
In Still Life with Tulips,11 Ambrosius Bosschaert’s son, Johannes (c1605–c1629), shows tulips with more rounded petals. Red and white varieties are more favoured than red and yellow ones, and the picture shows the results of some of the first attempts to breed purple and white tulips, later to become the florists’ Bybloemens. Jacob Marrell (1614–1681) painted these too, as in Flower Still Life12, which shows an elegant tulip, brownish-purple flamed on white, balanced precariously on a ledge with pink roses, lilies of the valley and heartsease. Where just one tulip is shown in a composition, it was most probably a spectacularly rare one such as the ‘Generael der Generaelen van Gouda’ shown in Dirck van Delen’s painting of 1637.13 The General of Generals stands on its own, militarily to attention, in a bulbous blue and white vase, its only companions some curious shells, arranged to the left of the vase.
In his Still Life of Flowers and Fruit14 painted around 1626, Johannes Bosschaert showed two different tulips of the kind now classified as Viridifloras and Parrots. The thin-petalled tulip at the top of the composition shows a distinct overlay of green on the red and white colouring. The flower on the left is of a stubbier, chunkier, more muddled form, the red and cream petals showing the ragged edges typical of the Parrot tulips that the French called Monstreuses. Ambrosius Bosschaert’s young brother-in-law Balthasar van der Ast (1593/4–1657) shows one unusually modest tulip in his Basket of Flowers15 painted in the 1620s. It appears on the right of the picture, a short, blunt flower of purple, edged with white. Emmanuel Sweert offered the same type (no. 32) in his catalogue, labelling it ‘Tulipa purpurea rub. saturata albis oris’. The ‘Edgers’ were not as highly valued as the striped tulips and breeders spent less time improving them. Van der Ast’s little purple tulip is almost half the size of the showy red and white beauty that dominates the composition. The ‘Dukes’, or ‘Ducs’ as they were generally known (named after Adrian Duyck of Oud-Karspel), remained remarkably stable in their conformation and colouring. Violet Ducs, just like van der Ast’s tulip, still grow in the Hortus Bulborum, the collection of historic bulbs maintained at Limmen. Van der Ast seemed to have a penchant for oddities in the tulip field. The Violet Due appears to be a five- rather than the more normal six-petalled flower. So does the exquisite white tulip, delicately feathered in red, which lies in the foreground of Still Life with Fruit and Shells,16 painted in 1620. The work is in van der Ast’s best doomed manner, the fruit crawling with insects. He painted other curiosities too, tulips with more petals than the norm. His Vase of Flowers with Shells17 shows two white tulips feathered and flamed with red. They may have been especially prized as one has seven petals, the other eight. The petals are notched and untidy (another effect of the virus) but the lower flower is splayed open, to show the intriguing complexity of the stamens and anthers. The exquisite red and white tulip lying on a ledge in Tulip and Forget-me-not18 has an odd little horn of petal protruding from the flower. Van der Ast shows the same tulip (same horn, same markings) again on its own in his Tulip in a Gilt-Mounted Glass Vase.19 At this period of course, the tulip was an extraordinarily costly flower, often worn like a jewel, as in France, by women of fashion. The anonymous portrait of Amalia van Solms20 shows the style, tulips with lilies of the valley caught up to fasten the sitter’s hair at the back. But professional tulip growers, such as Abraham Catoleyn in Amsterdam, Pieter Bol and Jan Quackel in Haarlem, established reputations which at the time were at least as great as those of Bosschaert or van der Ast.
De Heem and Daniel Seghers show tulips that are larger in relation to the rest of the flowers in the arrangements than those of Ambrosius Bosschaert The distribution of the colour on the petals becomes ever more subtle, the flower itself becomes looser in shape. In works such as Jan van Huysum’s famous Flowers in a Terracotta Vase21 or Vase of Flowers in a Niche22 the transformation is complete. These are big, blowsy, familiar tulips with rounded petals. What has been lost in finesse of form has been gained in the refinement of the markings. Though the petals are longer and looser, they are exquisitely marked and van Huysum shows that the long, patient process of breeding Bybloemens, as close to black and white as nature would allow, was now almost complete. The markings on these tulips are very much lighter, more symmetrically arranged, than on the early flowers when nature’s own breaks (caused by virus) had been indiscriminately seized on and exploited. Standards of excellence had been set and in Roses and Bybloemens florists in Flanders and Holland, as in England, were looking for flowers with only the finest pencilling of red or dark purple on a predominantly white ground. Van Huysum’s beautiful purple and white tulip, shown in the Vase of Flowers in a Niche, was brought to perfection in ‘Louis XVI’, the quintessential Bybloemen of the eighteenth-century tulip fancy. This was introduced into The Netherlands from Flanders and offered for the first time (at 250 guilders a bulb) in 1789, forty years after van Huysum’s death, by the Dutch florist, M van Nieuwkerk.
The first phase of the tulip craze, dominated by connoisseurs and scholars, was followed, from the late 1620s onwards, by a second phase, distinguished by the increasing professionalism of the growers. As the tulip became a commercial commodity, the nursery trade became more entrepreneurial and many new businesses were set up. Contemporary registers of property owners in Haarlem record Claes Verwers’s garden of seventy-six rods in the Eerste Laen. Hendrick Swalmius had seventeen rods in the Boll’s Laen. Hendrick Vestens cultiva
ted forty-eight rods in the Coninx Laen. Pieter van Dorp, Davidt de Milt and Guillaume de Milt were all in the Dorpen Laen. Jan de Smet, François van Engelant (an English incomer, surely?), Bartel Harmans, Pieter Maertsz and four others were on the east side of the Kleine Houtweg. Jan Jacobsz, Hendrick Joosten, Claes Hendricxz, Frans Markus and thirteen other nurserymen were on the west side. Jan Casteleijn, who raised the ‘Amerael Katelijn’ and the ‘Parragon Kateleyn’ sold at the 1637 Alkmaar bulb auction, traded from the south side of the Campenslaen23. Some of the new generation of nurserymen had worked as apprentices in the olderestablished companies. Barent Cardoes, for instance, whose name crops up regularly in the papers dealing with the estate of another florist, Davidt de Milt, had been Pieter Bol’s head man but left in his thirties to set up his own nursery near Haarlem. The rich alluvial soil around Haarlem was ideal for bulb production, and along the Houtweg, growers such as Jan van Damme started trading directly with buyers. Shortage of available land was a constant problem for growers. Contracts drawn up between buyers and sellers at the height of the Dutch tulipomania show that bulbs were often grown on plots belonging to a third party, who doubtless took a cut from the proceeds of any sale. Van Damme rented land from a local almshouse to keep up with the ever increasing demand for tulip bulbs. The majority of the growers were of course Dutch, but foreigners, such as the Portuguese Jew Francisco Gomez da Costa, also flourished. He had a nursery at Vianen and specialised in growing the brilliant yellow and red striped Bizarden.