Tulips and myths

I have been reading a new book about tulip fever in the Netherlands in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - Tulipmania, by Anne Goldgar, ponderously sub-titled Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age.  It’s the kind of book I belong to libraries for - I like to buy my books, but there are some so entrancing, yet so forbidding and remote (and so expensive), that buying is not realistic, especially if you are not sure whether you will be entranced or bored.

But I am the first person to have borrowed this from the London Library - as you go in, they have a seductive double bookshelf of new acquisitions, which is always a fertile ground for distraction and discovery.  Although Goldgar’s technique is to amass detail on detail to demonstrate her point by sheer weight of evidence, there is a really interesting story brought to life by domestic and civic detail.

From the late 1690s onwards, gardening became a major interest of Dutchmen, and they began to collect the strange and the beautiful as well as the useful.  Among the flowers which attracted them were tulips, and they quickly became much sought after and collected, often on expeditions to the Near East and beyond.  But instead of being propagated and marketed, and the price dropping as they became a commodity, they remained rare and were collected and bred for variety; they became, for certain specimens, enormously costly. 

Tulips seem to have been seriously collected from the 1590s onwards, but the really rapid rise in prices took place in the last few months of 1636 and the first few weeks of the following year; although most tulips were not wildly priced, a landmark was the famous Alkmaar auction of 5 February, in which two bulbs were sold for just over 4,000 and 5,000 florins respectively (modern purchasing power about £30,000 and £37,500, although these figures may understate the situation, as 1,000 guilders would buy a modest house in Haarlem at the time).  The most valuable tulips were those with ragged petals and a variegated or striped pattern, caused by a virus.  Tulips were on a par with art, in that they were a collectible according status and admitting connoisseurship; the great floral paintings of the period illustrate this in abundance, although there is no truth in the story that tulips appeared in memento mori paintings after the crash as a comment on the dangers of worldly speculation - they were appearing long before that. 

But a crash there was in early February 1637, and prices plunged, although tulip trading did not cease altogether.  At this point, an element of myth takes over, involving widespread economic damage, poor people losing their all through foolish speculation - a story which is most famously told in Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, probably still the dominant version today.  Historians like Simon Schama, in his seminal masterpiece, The Embarrassment of Riches, have offered a more nuanced account, but the wild myths live on.  Anna Pavord in The Tulip subscribes to some of the myths, as does Deborah Moggach in Tulip Fever - but Moggach is writing fiction, so is excused!

The truth was more prosaic, though no less interesting.  This was a trade between a small group of people, pretty expert and knowledgeable, and largely from the wealthy professional or trading classes.  Neither the very highest, nor the lower, levels of society were much involved.  And while the sums of money were large, Goldgar can find only 37 people who had spent more than 400 guilders (about £3,000 today), and they were largely men who expended much larger sums in trade or on art.  The trade was one of great judgement and trust, because the bulbs are only in bloom for a few weeks, and must - according to the Dutch gardeners of the period at least - stay in the ground from September until the flowers were over in about May, when cash changed hands.  These were futures contracts.  It was difficult to be sure what you were buying, and if you sold a garden, the bulbs might well remain with the seller - or have been sold on before to a third to even fourth party!  So at the point of the crash, none of the deals from the previous September on had been settled.  Although there was great consternation, and a lot of legal and public dismay, very little actually happened - no one was made bankrupt, and there was no discernible impact on the Dutch economy.

What did happen was that there was a moral debate about the value of tulips, and the vanity of worldly pleasure, and there was shock at the breaking of trust and honour, a crucial matter in a major trading nation.  But, the trade in tulips resumed in later years, and a hundred years late great prices were being paid for narcissi.  Art continued to portray the tulip, beautifully and as a symbol of earthly fragility, and the Dutch tulip business grew and grew, as any visitor to the Netherlands can see in any year in the spring!  The myth will doubtless die hard, but tulipmania was a brief moment of madness among wealthy connoisseurs and traders, which harmed no-one, and quickly revived after the events of 1637.  I got my spring bulb catalogue last week, and I shall certainly place an order!

Images courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library and Cornflower

Comments

[Harriet]

Interesting sounding book. Thanks. Funny how these myths get about, isn't it.