The Tulip

by Anna Pavord

  One of the many law suits brought forward at the time concerned a bulb of the tulip ‘Admiral Lieffkens’ bought by a fifty-year-old baker, Jeuriaen Jansz, at a price of six guilders, or twelve stuivers an azen. At the time the deal was made, the tulip, a handsome variety with pointed petals, crimson stripes on white, was growing in the garden of a neighbour, Sr Cresser. But, wrote the lawyer, ‘the witness coming to the house of Cornelis Arentsz. Kettingman, innkeeper here, at the college and in the society of several tulipists overheard, from remarks freely made in other conversation, that they knew for certain that the aforesaid tulip “Admiral Lieffkens” had been looked at, and taken out of the ground, and the earth scraped off. Because once the exact weight of the offset of the aforesaid tulip was known, no one would desire to buy for so high a price as he, the plaintiff, had paid previously’, the deal was legally cancelled.33 Lawyers, as well as speculators, got rich during the tulip boom.

  Jeuriaen Jansz’s action was brought on 1 August 1636, when silly money was still being paid for tulip bulbs, or rather tulip futures. Once the flower became a trader’s notion rather than a gardener’s joy, it attracted more and more middle men, each intent on taking his cut. From spring 1636, when selling by azen was first introduced, these fees alone pushed up tulip prices dramatically. Only the finest tulips, ‘piece-goods’ such as ‘Viceroy’ and ‘Semper Augustus’, were sold by the azen. The most highly prized tulips were, like those, ‘breaks’ of red and white or purple and white. Breaks of red and yellow were the next most valuable, with good ‘Lacs’ of red or purple, bordered with whites coming a bad third. Single-coloured tulips were least highly valued, unless they were varieties known to be good ‘breeders’, likely to break into expensive stripes. Cheaper tulips were sold by the pound, or even by the basket.

  As one of the crusading pamphleteers had predicted, once there were more sellers than buyers in the market (and given the number of people that could easily happen), the collapse of tulipomania would be inevitable. It was. Trade in 1637 began briskly enough. On 16 January 1637 Pieter Willemsen van Rosven paid ninety florins for one ‘Legrant’ tulip, which had weighed 122 azen at planting time. The tulip grew in the garden of the local predicant or priest, Henricus Swalmus. Walmius, as his name was more usually written, looked after the parish of the Nederlands Hervormde Gemeente church at Haarlem from 16 October 1625 to 12 January 1649 and had his garden in the Bollslaen (Bulb lane), near the Kleine Houtweg, Haarlem. The previous day, the same van Rosven had sold (for 230 florins) a ‘Jan Gerrits’ tulip growing in Cornelis Verwer’s garden and weighing 288 azen when planted. The wine money amounted to twelve stuivers. Over the next two weeks, van Rosven traded like a maniac, making – on paper at least – nearly 3,000 guilders on tulips.34 Despite the sky-high prices realised at the Alkmaar sale on 5 February 1637 (or perhaps even precipitated by it), rumours were eating away at the flimsy foundations of the tulip boom. At the end of these fabulously long chains of traded azen, somebody, somewhere had to want the flower itself. If nobody did, the whole edifice would fold, as it did, spectacularly, when all dealing in tulip bulbs was suspended in the middle of February 1637.

  On 23 February florists (that is, the growers) from Alkmaar, Delft, Enkhuizen, Gouda, Haarlem, Hoorn, Leiden, Medemblik, Rotterdam, de Streek, Utrecht and Vianen met at Amsterdam to ‘deliberate on the actions of Flora and to abolish the misunderstandings which have arisen recently between them owing to the high auctions of the tulips’. The delegates included Francisco Gomez da Costa from Vianen, Barent Cardoes from Haarlem, Jacques Baelde from Leiden, Cornelis Rotteval from Gouda and François Sweert from Utrecht. The following day they issued a statement (Amsterdam dissenting) setting out their solution. Any sales made up until the end of the previous planting season (November 1636) were to be treated as binding. Transactions made after that date could be cancelled by the buyer, by paying ten per cent of the agreed price to the seller.35 But as Gaergoedt complained to Waermondt, the buyers were ‘nowhere to be found’. The law courts were packed out with dealers seeking to claim their percentages from buyers reluctant to pay them.

  Then a counter-petition drawn up by improvident buyers was handed to the Governors of Holland and West Friesland at The Hague, asking for all transactions entered into over the previous winter to be cancelled. On 27 April 1637 the States of Holland and West Friesland, who seemed to be more on the side of the buyers than the sellers, decreed that sellers should get what they could for tulips promised to buyers who refused to pay up, and make the original buyer answerable for any difference in price. Further trading was suspended. But the States should have foreseen that such legislation would be unworkable. On 1 May the Burgomasters and Governors of Haarlem told the town’s solicitors and notaries not to bring forward any more cases relating to the tulip trade. On 20 June, E van Bosvelt, a Haarlem solicitor, declared that ‘only a few honest people have compromised by paying one, two, three, four, yes, even five, which was the utmost, out of a hundred. They, the witnesses [Haarlem florists], understand that such has happened in the same way at Amsterdam, Gouda, Hoorn, Enchuizen and Alkmaar. There are also a great number of persons unwilling to pay or come to a compromise. No justice has been administered.’36

  There the matter rested until, on 30 January 1638, an arbitration council, with five members, was set up in Haarlem to mediate between dissatisfied sellers and buyers. The aim was to reconcile the two parties, but later, on 28 May, sufficient power was given to the council to make its judgments binding. Whether reconciled or not, buyers and sellers had to accept the council’s decision. Outstanding contracts could be liquidated at 3.5% of the original price, the bulbs remaining with the seller. The commission in Haarlem was kept busy during the whole of 1638 and there were penalties for those (usually buyers) who did not appear at a hearing when summoned. Other towns adopted similar measures, so it was brave of the Dutch artist, Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp to paint in 1638 a picture of a tulip bed gay with extravagantly flamed flowers.37 After this wild fling, moderation, prudence and discretion returned to the burghers of The Netherlands. They nearly lost control again in 1734 when a passion for hyacinths threatened to equal the earlier mania for tulips, but a hasty reissue of the Samenspraecken brought the eighteenth-century speculators to their senses.

  As the Dutch economist, N W Posthumus has pointed out, all the conditions generally associated with the first period of a boom were present in The Netherlands of the 1630s. ‘An increasing currency, new economic and colonial possibilities, and a keen and energetic class of merchants, together had created the optimistic atmosphere in which booms are said to grow’.38 All that was needed was the right commodity, and the tulip obligingly presented itself at the right time and in the right place. Less prosaically, Zbigniew Herbert ascribed the cause to ‘the old myth of humanity about miraculous multiplication’,39 setting the tulip in the same context as loaves and dragon’s teeth. Or was this uncharacteristic rush of blood to Dutchmen’s heads a symptom of relief after the twin evils of the plague and the Thirty Years War? In 1630, the prospects for the Dutch Republic had been gloomy, for the armies of the Catholic Emperor dominated Central Europe from Bohemia to the Baltic Coast. The Dutch were completely hemmed in on the south and east; their only escape lay on their seaward side. When, in 1632, the victories of Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant King of Sweden, ensured that the Protestant religion would survive, this must have seemed like a miraculous delivery. The war was not over, but the deliverance, perhaps, was expressed in wild speculation.

  In the Samenspraecken, Waermondt asks how tulips got so many names. ‘If a change in a tulip is effected’ explains Gaergoedt, ‘one goes to a florist and tells him and it soon gets talked about. Everyone is anxious to see it. If it is a new flower each one gives his opinion; one compares it to this, another to that flower. If it looks like an “Admiral”, you call it a “General” or any name you fancy, and stand a bottle of wine to your friends that they may remember to talk about it.’ Tulips, with carnations, were the fir
st flowers to be given special names, what would now be called cultivar names: purple and white ‘Viceroy’, scarlet and white ‘Admiral van der Eyck’, ‘Bruin Purpur’ which was purplish-brown on a white ground. For traders, the baptism was important, because it created and distinguished particular components of a general commodity. Then, as now, it was partly a matter of whim that some colour combinations were more highly prized than others. But it was also a fact that red and white breaks such as ‘Semper Augustus’ were more difficult to produce than red and yellow ones and consequently could command higher prices. Pieter Holsteyn the Younger’s painting of ‘Semper Augustus’ shows, though, that this was a very unusual break. Most often, the two colours of broken tulips ran in long, continuous stripes down the petals. But in ‘Semper Augustus’ the red colour breaks into flakes, symmetrically set round the outsides of the petals. Long before tulipomania raged, it was considered a masterpiece. But neither of the lists of fine tulips published in the Samenspraecken include ‘Semper Augustus’. Nor was it offered for sale in the great Alkmaar auction of 1637. In the Samenspraecken, Waermondt makes clear that although he has heard of the fabled flower, he has never seen it. He could see it at the homes of only two people, replies Gaergoedt, ‘one in Amsterdam from which it comes, and also here at the home of one who will not sell for any money; so they are in close hands’. The one bulb that had changed hands for 2,000 guilders at the beginning of the tulipomania had done so with the restriction that the buyer could not pass the tulip on to anyone else without the consent of the original seller (Adriaen Pauw of Heemstede). One of the last of the great English Florists, the Rev. Francis Horner, who died in 1912, took a jaundiced view of the legendary ‘Semper Augustus’, describing it as a ‘rough bizarre of spattery flame and with skips in feather, long in the cup and thin in petal, foul in stamen and perhaps base in base – in fact with a touch of all the faults and blemishes from which we have led the tulip through to purity and beauty’. But English florists only had eyes for English florists’ tulips. Call it patriotism. Or xenophobia.

  It was inevitable that tulipomania would be followed by an equally intense hatred of the flower. The professor of botany at Leiden grew so to loathe them that he attacked them savagely wherever they stood, thwacking them with his cane. Artists turned out some pungent cartoons and caricatures. Floraes Gecks-kap (Flora’s Fool’s Cap) shows an inn made in the shape of a fool’s cap, the tulip fanciers huddled inside, weighing tulips with a set of goldsmith’s scales. The name of the inn, written on a banner is ‘At the Sign of the Fools’ Bulbs’ and it shows two fools fighting. To the right of the inn is Flora, seated on a donkey, a symbol of stupidity, being beaten by disappointed florists. In the foreground, separated from the mayhem, are a group of three tulip growers holding the tools of their trade – a rake and a wicker basket. To the left of the inn is a smiling speculator, a rich one too, by the look of his hat and cloak. Behind him is the Devil with a rod and line, fishing for tulip sale notes. In his right hand he carries an hour glass, suggesting that the speculators’ time is up. In front of him, other speculators are already tipping their bulbs on the rubbish heap. The engraving’s sub-title tells the full story: ‘A Picture of the wonderful year 1637 when one Fool hatched another, the Idle Rich lost their Wealth and the Wise lost their Senses.’40

  In Flora’s Malle-wagen (Flora’s Chariot of Fools) three florists called Sweet Beard, Eager for Wealth and Travelling Light are riding in a chariot with Flora who is clasping a cornucopia of tulips. In her other hand she holds a trio of hopelessly expensive tulips, ‘Semper Augustus’, ‘General Bol’ and ‘Admiral van Horn’. Her companions in the chariot are Hoard-it-all and Vain hope, who has just released a bird. ‘Vain hope has flown the coop’ runs the legend above its head. A great crowd of weavers runs after the chariot shouting ‘We will all sail with you’, trampling their looms in the process. The chariot is rolling over a carpet of single precious tulips (added by the engraver Crispyn de Passe to the original painting by Hendrik Pot). ‘Gouda’ is here and the fabulously expensive ‘Viceroy’. De Passe also included four vignettes in each of the four corners of the engraving, showing the various stages of the tulipomania. In the top left is a view of Pottebacker’s nursery at Haarlem. In the bottom left, tulip fanciers meet in their club room at Haarlem. The vignette in the top right shows a similar company of florists at Hoorn. In the bottom right, a florist tenders a sale note.41 To a seventeenth-century Dutch audience, the meaning of the cartoons would have been as clear as Vicky’s political cartoons were to a newspaper-reading English audience of the twentieth century. They would immediately have seen the point of Jan Brueghel’s satirical painting of monkeys enthusiastically engaged in the tulip trade.42 But though Dutch speculators may have been disenchanted by the tulip after the savage upsets of 1637, the true lovers of the flower were not. Slowly, gently, quietly, the tulip continued to re-invent itself. The best was yet to come.

  Chapter V

  Dutch Dominance

  Tulipomania was a chastening experience for the Dutch. The gay paintings of tulips accompanied by vividly plumaged parrots and strange shells which had mirrored the early seventeenth-century fascination with all things exotic, gave way to more gloomy groupings of tulips with skulls, hour-glasses and other reminders of the transitoriness of things. But even after the crash of spring 1637, tulip bulbs still had value. An anonymous Dutch painting c16401 shows Flora with a pair of scales, a jewel on one side, a tulip bulb on the other; the bulb weighs more heavily. A malevolent-looking Pan surveys the scene while supporting Cupid who is clutching a tulip flower in his hand. And documents of 1643 relating to the estate of the nurseryman Jan van Damme of the Kleine Houtweg, Haarlem, show that, even after the end of tulipomania, the average yearly wage of a Haarlemer would still not be enough to buy one of van Damme’s best tulips. Salomon Seijs paid him 180 guilders for one ‘Gouda’ and 315 guilders for a ‘Manassier’. Dirck Janss parted with 300 guilders for a single bulb of the variety ‘Bellaert’. The widow Ruth van Berckhoff paid 325 guilders for an English ‘Admiral’, evidently a highly prized tulip as another buyer, Willem Willemss handed over 402 guilders for the same variety. ‘Paragon Lieffkens’ commanded high prices too, Anthony Gerrit paying van Damme 300 guilders for his bulb. But bulbs from the Lieffkens stable were always among the most expensive available; at the Alkmaar tulip auction of 1637, an offset of an ‘Admiral Lieffkens’ bulb, weighing only 59 azen, had sold for 1,015 guilders.

  The continuing demand for flower paintings, too, showed that the tulip was not universally reviled, even though it had been responsible for bankrupting so many who had traded in tulip futures. From 1650–1720 Jan Davidsz de Heem, Daniel Seghers, Abraham Mignon, Simon Verelst, Rachel Ruysch all included tulips in their work, often setting them in the top right-hand corner of the mixed arrangements they painted. None of the later artists, though, plagiarised themselves as gaily as Jan Brueghel had done at the beginning of the seventeenth century. His flower piece in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam is virtually identical to his panel in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. His son Jan Brueghel II continued the process, making another copy of the painting, which is now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. The elder Brueghel had done much the same with his Vase of Flowers2 which has a virtual twin in Flowers in a Stoneware Jar.3 The Vase of Flowers painting has the more interesting foreground, with jewels lying carelessly to the right of the vase and in the Flowers in a Stoneware Jar, the tulip at the top of the Vase of Flowers painting is replaced by an iris, another favourite of covetous collectors.

  In the decorative arts, tulips bloomed, especially on painted and inlaid furniture. They appear on a money chest decorated with panels of painted flowers4 and on the front of an ebony and cedarwood Kunstkabinet made in the third quarter of the seventeenth century and inlaid with tulips in mother of pearl. The doors of the cabinet open to show drawers and four small cupboards, each cupboard front painted with a tulip.5 The versatile Jacob Marrell turned his hand to stained glass, using
enamel paint and grisaille to produce a wonderful orange and red flamed tulip in a coat of arms possibly from the Oosterkerk in Hoorn.6 Tulips appeared too on bed hangings, tapestries and curtains. Embroidered curtains from the second half of the seventeenth century show bunches of characteristically waisted tulips, worked in satin stitch, knot stitch and stem stitch.7 Tulips were woven into the borders of Flemish tapestries, the flowers arranged in bouquets which often seem to have been copied from contemporary flower paintings.8

  Fifty years after the end of tulipomania, the first of the so-called tulip vases began to appear, strange tall pagoda-like creations with spouts jutting out at the top and sides. For a long time it was assumed that the vases were used either for displaying tulip flowers or for growing tulips indoors, the bulbs placed over water in the spouts, much as hyacinths are grown today. But as the English botanist, Philip Miller had discovered, tulips do not grow well like this; at a time when bulbs were still expensive, it seems odd that anyone would have chosen such a risky way of flowering them.9 The vases may have been used to grow hyacinths and were described as such (‘portebouquets, avec huite tubes pour jacinthes’) in 1877 by the French expert Henry Havard in his Catalogue des Faiences de Delft. Hyacinths would certainly be happier than tulips growing in this way, and the period when these strange vases were made (1680–1720) is closer to the time of the Dutch hyacinth craze than it is the earlier tulip mania. But their use remains a puzzle. None of the hundreds of flower paintings of the Golden Age shows flowers in a Delftware holder. None of the paintings in the Hortus Regius Honselaersdicensis, a record of the fresh cut flowers delivered weekly to Honselaersdijk, William and Mary’s summer house, around 1688, show flowers in a Delft flower holder. Embroidered chair covers at Croft Castle in Herefordshire feature them, but they mostly show mixed bouquets of flowers coming from the spouts; only one embroidery shows a tulip.