by Anna Pavord
Blue and white chinoiserie-style Delft ware was avidly collected in the late seventeenth century, mixed with genuine Chinese porcelain in special display cabinets. One was made in 1663 at Oranienburg near Berlin for Louise Henriette, the wife of the elector of Brandenburg. Louis XIV had one too, the Trianon de Porcelaine, full of chinoiserie ware ordered from the potteries at Delft. The style setter of the time was Daniel Marot, a Huguenot who, after the repeal of the Edict of Nantes, had fled from France to The Netherlands. He quickly found his feet for in 1686, only a year after he had arrived in the country, he was employed by William and Mary to bring a touch of French glamour to the Dutch court. He carried out work for them too at their hunting lodge, Het Loo, near Apeldoorn, considered at the time to be the last word in modernity and style. Marot tackled architecture, interior design and garden-making all with equal verve and created splendid settings for Mary’s impressive collection of ceramics, though none of the contemporary engravings of his interiors show a Delft flower holder. The influence worked the other way. The swags, garlands, shell motifs and diamond patterns of Marot’s interior decor began to appear as decorations on the flower vases themselves, particularly the ones coming from the De Grieksche A factory belonging to Adriaen Kocks. As well as the popular pagoda design, Delft flower pots also appeared in the shape of busts of Turkish sultans10. Marot may have had a hand in this too, for he had a passion for all things Turkish. But whether in the shape of pyramids, sultans or other guises, there is little evidence that these flower pots were ever used for growing tulips. Only since the beginning of this century have they assumed the name (and by extension the function) of tulip vases.11
Regular advertisements in the Haerlemse Courant, the Haarlem newspaper, confirm that at the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth, trade in tulip bulbs was still buoyant, though the advertisements (as in that of the Widow van Severijn Oosterwijk who advertised ‘Anjelieren, droge Tulpen-Bollen, Hyacinthen, Narcissen and Dubbelde Jonquilles’ on 17 July 1694) touted tulips in general rather than named tulips in particular. A clear distinction was beginning to emerge between nurserymen and what in England would be called florists, tulip-fanciers, or in Dutch, liefhebbers. In his preface to The Dutch Gardener, the Leyden gardener, Henry van Oosten, sniffily pointed out that his book (published in 1700) was aimed at ‘the true Sons and Lovers of Flora’ rather than ‘those who trade and deal in Flowers’. Van Oosten’s treatise, like Monstereul’s Le Floriste Français published in Caen in 1654 and Samuel Gilbert’s Florist’s Vade Mecum published in London in 1682, was an opportunistic and very successful piece of publishing.12
Tulip seed, said van Oosten, should be sown in September. He recommended collecting seed from dark flowers ‘for when the White comes to play through these heavy Colours, it gives immediately to them a fine lustre and Beauty’. Flowers of black, purple, red or brown, were equally good for the purpose. Yellow flowers were to be avoided for ‘the Yellowness gives a Faintness to the Tulip that dulls the gloss of the Colours’. Van Oosten spells out the preference for tulips with petals that are ‘round above’ and do not ‘turn much about’ that is evident in the flower paintings of Jan van Huysum. Seed was best collected from flowers with white or yellow bases, ‘experience having taught us, that the Tulips that have such Bottoms sooner change from one to two colours, than those whose Bottoms are black’. This suggests, as one would expect, that the tulips still close to black-based wild species were less likely to ‘break’ than selected cultivars. ‘The Bottom is Master of the Colours which they seem to be willing to receive,’ as van Oosten put it. It was better also to take seed from single-coloured ‘breeders’ rather than from striped tulips. This was a useful observation, as it ran counter to what horticulturists of the time might have expected. The virus which produced the stripes (though nobody then knew that) also weakened the tulip, whose seed would not anyway produce flowers that matched the parent. The seed, wrote van Oosten, would come up ‘like leeks’ but gardeners had to wait between five and seven years before bulbs grew to flower-bearing size. Florists were becoming more rigid and uncompromising in their interpretation of the perfect tulip. ‘The parrot greens’ that had so delighted early painters such as Ambrosius Bosschaert ‘must go without Distinction to the Dunghil’.
Like other authors of the time, van Oosten was puzzled by the business of ‘breaking’. The whole shaky edifice of tulipomania had been built on the tulip’s sudden ability to burst into stripes and multi-coloured patterns. Van Oosten was more honest than other so-called experts. Many skilful florists, he wrote, had ‘puzzled their Heads in search of this Secret… Some pretend they have had good Success in it, but whether by Art or by Chance is yet uncertain’. Whereas in the early seventeenth century, there had been general agreement among tulip fanciers that ‘Semper Augustus’ was the best flower of its age, florists in the early eighteenth century found it more difficult to reach a consensus. ‘Some esteem the Violets striped with white, whose Colours as well within as without, are clean and distinct from one another, without any Mixture. Others prize the Bissarts; yet both are to be valu’d and a Florist ought to be provided with both of them. The Bissarts are duller than the Violets and more inclined to Inconstancy; for when they have bloomed one Year exceedingly beautifully, they sometimes appear the next as if they had never had any Beauty in them.’ There is no mention of the red and white tulips, the Roses such as ‘Semper Augustus’ which had so delighted an earlier generation of tulip fanciers. Judging tulips, wrote the sensible van Oosten, would be made very much easier ‘if many things were not despised because they are common, and if we did not always covet that which is seldom seen’. He had little time for those who complained that tulips had no scent. ‘They may supply themselves with Perfumes, and not upbraid this Queen of Flowers for want of that Quality.’
Van Oosten noted how, in full sun, the separate colours on a petal tended to run together. This was a problem that English florists fretted about too and it led to the construction of very complicated tulip beds with covers of canvas or rattan that could be used to shade the flowers when necessary. Van Oosten thought it was honeydew (the sticky secretion of aphids) that caused the colours to run. He was halfway to the truth. The sun was actually the cause, but the honeydew was deposited by the aphids who carried the virus that caused the tulips to break in the first place. In Le Floriste Français, the French author Monstereul had surrounded the business of tulip-growing with all kinds of ritualistic mumbo-jumbo. Van Oosten was evidently an observant grower and his treatise is more practical. He noticed for instance how ground could become tulip sick and that bulbs were best moved onto fresh beds every few years. He observed that only fat, full-grown bulbs would generally produce flowers. This was why the weight of a bulb played such an important part in the transactions between tulip growers and their customers. Weighing bulbs after lifting them in summer was also a good way of checking growing conditions. If the bulb had not bulked up, the grower was not giving it what it needed.
Van Oosten describes the process by which the mad trading, usually in public houses, of the Dutch tulipomania gave way to florists’ fraternities, the forerunners of the florists’ societies which flourished in England from the early eighteenth century onwards. ‘Tulips have always been greatly esteemed and chiefly by the Dutch, who in the Year 1637 intended to Traffick with them, as with Pearls and Diamonds: But the States forbad it for a Political Reason of State, and when the publick buying and selling of Tulips was thus prohibited, they fell to trucking and private selling; but because this could not be done without Animosities, thereupon the Flemish Florists erected a Fraternity in the Cities and took St Dorothea to be their Patroness and the Syndicus to be Judge of the Differences, that might arise by their trucking; and he to add Authority to it, called in four of the chief of the Brother-hood and this was the occasion of the sweet Conversation of the Brothers, and brought them into great Esteem. The Dutch keep in this matter another rule; they meet together on a certain
Day, when Tulips are in their full Bloom, and choose, after having seen the chief Gardens of the Florists, and taken a friendly and frugal Dinner together, one of the Company to be Judge of the Differences that might arise about Flowers in that Year.’ These were the first competitive events surrounding the tulip. It was a short way then to the process of picking the tulips and bringing them to a central place – usually an inn – for competition. In the hands of the English florists, the frugal dinner became a rather more debauched feast. Their shows were always based around local inns.
From the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards then, there was an increasing divergence between the nurserymen and the true ‘sons of Flora’. Often the one fed the other, the nurseryman buying from the amateur florist new breaks of a tulip that would subsequently appear at a vast price in his catalogue. His customers were the rich landowners too busy, too impatient, to spend years breeding these beauties themselves. But they could not do without them. On 17 May 1707 the Hague lawyer, Bartholomeus van Leeuwen sold his collection at auction, 230 lots that realised 3,858 guilders. The highest price (321 guilders) was paid for the Baguet ‘Fieldmarshal Averquercq’, with the Haarlem florist, Voorhelm, paying 195 guilders for another Baguet, ‘Schoon Aethiopica’. Not all the lots were of single bulbs. A bed of 120 seedling tulips sold in the same auction for 358 guilders. The bed was made up of twenty rows each containing six bulbs and each row was sold off separately.
May was the prime time for auctions of private collections; the flowers were in full bloom and buyers could clearly see the worth of the tulips they were bidding for. The sale the following year of the Rotterdam merchant Henricus van der Heym’s collection of tulips was also set for May: 16 May 1708. For twenty-one years van der Heym had owned a garden close to the outskirts of the town, where he had built up a noted collection of flowers. The catalogue of the sale listed tulips by number, name and weight They were arranged in two beds – 240 bulbs in all – and the sale realised 8,662 guilders. Once again, the Baguets commanded the highest prices, particularly the four lots of the Baguet ‘L’Imperiale’ which sold for 140, 204, 276, and 336 guilders each (about £65,000 in late twentieth-century terms).13
The Baguets, wide-cupped, round-petalled flowers, capable the Scottish grower James Justice had said, of holding ‘a pint of wine’ in their blooms, were a Flemish speciality and it is noticeable how many of the flowers, both in the van Leeuwen and the van der Heym sales, bore French rather than Dutch names. Some of van der Heym’s flowers were dated (Number two in the first bed the Baguet ‘Queva’ 1696, Number twelve in the first bed the Baguet Number two, 1696), which suggests that they might have been flowers of van der Heym’s own raising. But many of the rest – ‘Nouvelle de St Omer’, the Baguets ‘Potteau’, ‘Buisson Ardant’ and ‘Duchesse de Baviere’ suggest a French or Flemish origin. There were certainly close links between the two, the Flemish growers perhaps content to rely on the Dutch to get them prices for their tulips which they could not realise locally.
Bulbs as valuable as ‘Fieldmarshal Averquercq’ and ‘L’Imperiale’ were often owned by several people in partnership, which made buying and selling complicated – especially when the bulb was grown in ground belonging to a person who may or may not have been one of the syndicate. On 26 June 1709, the bulb dealer Jacob Bart wrote to Bartholomeus van Leeuwen at The Hague reporting from Utrecht on the condition of ‘our’ tulips. Bart had a third share in three Baguets, ‘Perel van der Hooge’, ‘La Torre’ and ‘Grand Mogol’ which together were valued at 720 guilders (about £49,000). He and his two partners, Jan Eutewael and Cornelis van Luchtenburgh had bought the bulbs from Philips van Borselle van der Hooge in Zeeland in May 1708. A ‘Conqueste de Zeelande’ had been in the van Leeuwen sale in 1707, raised perhaps by van der Hooge. Both Bart’s partners lived in Utrecht and Bart, who later sold half of his share in the tulips to van Leeuwen, reported favourably on the state of the bulbs after lifting. ‘La Torre’, which had been growing in van Luchtenburgh’s garden, had produced a large offset. The other two bulbs grew in Jan Eutewael’s garden. The ‘Perel van der Hooge’ had produced two offsets, one weighing forty azen. ‘Grand Mogol’ had not done so well. Bart subsequently sold his share in the bulbs to van Leeuwen for 120 guilders, rather less than the book price. Van Leeuwen’s auction had perhaps revealed that the prices of certain varieties had to be revised downwards.
Bart’s letter shows that he was the middle man in several tulip deals. He had been trying to sell 400 self-coloured tulips on van Leeuwen’s behalf and had, he wrote, already got one bid of fifteen guilders a hundred for them. Perhaps these were wild Turkish or Russian species which had come into van Leeuwen’s hands at The Hague. He was looking for an offset of the renowned ‘Premier Noble’ and was also hoping to get his hands on ‘Juweel van Utrecht’; a very small offset, he said, was on offer for thirty guilders. But Bart’s partner, Bartholomeus van Leeuwen, died in 1710 and all his bulbs were auctioned off for the benefit of his children. They raised 1,100 guilders, about £75,000 in late twentieth-century terms.
In France and England in the middle of the eighteenth century, a passion for all things classical and antique was sparked off by the archaeological excavations that were going on at Paestum and Herculaneum. Neo-classicism blossomed which was one of the reasons the tulip fell out of fashion. But in Holland, tulips continued to be advertised right through to the beginning of the nineteenth century. On 14 May 1711 the Flemish grower Thomas de Cafmeyer of the Guldeulies brewery at Brussels announced to the ‘Liefhebbers van Flora’ that he had raised from seed two or three hundred new flamed Bybloemens and Bizarres, better than anything that had ever been seen before. Abraham de Haes and Alexander de Vos both advertised tulips regularly, offering Haarlem customers Primo Baguets (the Primo prefix first crops up around 1712), Seconde Baguets which presumably were not quite so good, Grand Violetten and Bizarren. In a sale that took place in Henricus van der Heym’s Rotterdam garden, buyers could bid for ‘Curieuse Liefhebberij Tulpaen’.14 Here, as in England, the florists and their tulips were drawing further apart from the mainstream trade in bulbs, and tulips were advertised using the florists’ definitions: Bizarres (red, brown or black on yellow) and Violets, later to be called Bybloemens (violet or purple on a white ground).
Sales were highly organised; Heer Hodenpijl of Schiedam, who advertised a sale for the 20 May 1717, had catalogues available for interested customers not only in Schiedam, but in Dordrecht, Delft, Rotterdam and ‘s’Gravenhage as well. English customers were drawn in too, particularly by the well-known firms of Voorhelm and van Kampen. Voorhelm had been founded in the seventeenth century by Dirk Jansz Voorhelm who came from Westphalia to set up bulb gardens in the Kleine Houtweg, Haarlem. His son Pieter, who died in 1728, bred many fine hyacinths, for by the late 1720s, hyacinths were overtaking tulips in popularity. At about the time the Voorhelms went into partnership with Seger van Zompel, George Voorhelm (1711–1787) wrote a treatise on cultivating hyacinths, published in French in 1752. He was not popular with his fellow nurserymen for giving away what they considered to be trade secrets, which may be why the book, translated into English in 1753, never appeared in Dutch. Robert Hales, an English enthusiast, called at the nursery of Voorhelm, ‘the famous Flowerist at Haarlem’, and wrote to a friend that his stock was good, ‘but so mighty deer yt I did not venture to buy any’.
The Haarlem nurseryman, Nicolaas van Kampen, reflected the prevailing taste by opening his 1739 catalogue with hyacinths – nearly 500 of them. But he still offered masses of tulips too, including almost a hundred early varieties. They were followed in the list by various kinds of late tulip: 123 ‘Veranderde Primo Baguetten’, that is breeders that had broken into feathers and flames, eighty-two different yellow and red Bizarres, and 176 additional late tulips. Selling bulbs by their weight in azen was no longer the norm. Bulbs of the first division were sold only at flowering size, with prices quoted for a single bulb. By this stage tulips – even the fine ones – were not
such rare commodities and prices had dropped dramatically. Where previously prices had been quoted in hundreds, even thousands of guilders, van Kampen now asked more modest sums: eight guilders for a ‘Juweel van Haarlem’, eight guilders for a ‘Rigaut Admiraal’. Those were the most expensive. The average price was closer to one guilder per bulb. Smaller bulbs were sold by the hundred and van Kampen’s catalogue suggests that nurserymen were by this stage using bulb griddles of various gauges to grade bulbs by size. Bulbs of the first sorting cost twenty-five guilders a hundred. The bulbs left after the sixth sorting could be had for only four guilders a hundred, but tulip fanciers had to be patient and grow them on to flowering size. By this stage it really was cheaper to plant your garden with real flowers rather than get van Huysum, the artist of the day, to paint them for you.
Like George Voorhelm before him, Nicolaas van Kampen also supposed that a book would be good for business; like Voorhelm too, he published it in French. The French had been the first to single the tulip out for special attention, distinguishing it as a flower that was not just there to decorate a garden, but was worth cultivating for its own sake. Van Kampen’s English translator piously hoped ‘that the following Translation will be an acceptable present to the English Florists, as it teaches the whole art of raising, cultivating and treating all kinds of Bulbous Rooted Flowers, according to the method practised by the most experienced Florists in Holland and Flanders, whose industry and skill in this respect have been such, that they have for above a century enjoyed the reputation of being alone possessed of some secret in this Business unknown to the rest of the world, and by that means secured to themselves a very gainful monopoly… Our countrymen that love and delight in Gardening have it now in their power, by pursuing this certain method, to reap the same profit, as well as to enjoy the in-felt satisfaction of seeing their parterres adorned with native beauties, propagated by their own pains, without squandering away English money upon Foreigners’.15