Tulipomania (13 page)

Customers who paid more than they anticipated for their bulbs were not the only people to be shortchanged by the owners of the tulip books; the artists who illustrated them—a few of whom were eminent painters in their own right—were generally very poorly paid for their efforts, perhaps earning only a handful of stuivers per page. Marginal notes in a book painted largely by Jacob van Swanenburch of Leiden, the master who taught Rembrandt van Rijn, show that the painter completed 122 flower pictures for a fee of just over six stuivers per painting.

Jacob van Swanenburch was not the only highly regarded artist to contribute to a grower’s tulip book. Judith Leyster, the only woman who actually earned her living as a painter in the United Provinces during the Golden Age, painted two Rosen tulips for an album now commonly known as
Judith Leyster’s Tulip Book
in her honor, although the rest of the paintings are by other hands, and Pieter Holsteijn the Younger illustrated a manuscript for a grower named Cos that carries the date 1637 and, unusually, gives not only the flowers’ names (some of them in the form of a riddle or a rebus) but their price and the weight of each bulb when planted. It consisted of fifty-three gouaches of tulips, with twelve additional drawings and some watercolors of carnations.

A close study of this and other flower albums shows that many of the artists who produced them created something approaching a production line of illustrations by arranging for their assistants to paint the flowers’ leaves and stems (often in a hackneyed style that probably bore only a sketchy resemblance to their real appearance) and executing only the difficult portion—the petals—themselves. Others copied sketches of the rarest varieties from earlier books, although some of the tulips were so scarce that they must have been included more for the sake of completeness than anything else.

With tulip books at their disposal, Dutch nurserymen were armed with a valuable sales tool that could be used to attract more customers and lure existing ones to try new varieties. But the surviving albums, thronged with page after page of all but identical Rosen, Violetten, and Bizarden flowers, inadvertently make an important point about the often-chaotic workings of the seventeenth-century flower trade.

One of the major difficulties facing both growers and connoisseurs was the problem of distinguishing between strikingly similar varieties. Even the most knowledgeable dealers and growers must have found it difficult, if not impossible, to tell one Rosen tulip from another with almost identical markings, even though those varieties might be worth very different sums. This problem lay at the root of a number of the sometimes bitter disputes between growers and their customers that dot the surviving records of the flower trade.

The fact that tulips of the same variety differed one from another and from generation to generation did not help; nor did the plethora of confusingly similar names that were bestowed upon new flowers by their creators. Outsiders found the chaotic nomenclature of Dutch tulips almost impossible to grapple with. In this early period there were no firm rules and certainly no central authority that could impose any sort of order on the way tulips were named. Anyone who created a new variety had the privilege of conferring a title upon it, and generally they chose either to give it an overblown name that hinted at the exceptional qualities they felt it possessed, or to name it after themselves. Quite frequently they managed to do both.

The man who inadvertently found himself responsible for this craze was the bailiff of Kennermerland, the coastal region between
Haarlem and the sea. He created a Rosen tulip of exceptional beauty, and casting around for a name to convey its excellence, he decided to christen it Admirael (“admiral”). Before long the Admirael name had become the highest epithet to which a tulip could aspire, and other growers flocked to apply it to their own creations: Admirael Liefkens, Admirael Krijntje, Admirael van Enckhuysen, and the most celebrated of all, Admirael van der Eijck. Foreigners sometimes made the mistake of believing that these flowers were named after naval heroes of the Dutch Revolt, but of course they really commemorated not sailors but the horticulturists who had created the flower. At the time of the tulip mania there were already about fifty different varieties with the Admirael prefix, and another thirty or so that bore the rival title Generael (“general”). The Generaels included one flower that had been named Generael van der Eijck, perhaps in the hope of persuading potential buyers that its qualities matched those of the fabled Admirael tulip.

Nor did matters end there. Once the fashion for Admiraels and Generaels had run its course, growers took the logical next step of searching for new superlatives and created a class of plants named Generalissimo. Next came varieties named after real Classical heroes such as Alexander the Great and Scipio, and eventually two tulips from Gouda titled, with breathtaking arrogance, “Admiral of Admirals” and “General of Generals.” At least these really were superbly fine varieties, noted for their size and fiery scarlet stripes.

Such practices meant that many inferior tulips received the Admirael or Generael name, and customers could not necessarily even determine the sort of flower they were buying simply from its title. Generaels, for example, were almost always Rosen tulips, but at least three Violettens bore the name, and there were Violetten and even Bizarden Admiraels. Naturally all this confusion meant that growers
had to do what they could to publicize the new varieties they had created. One contemporary writer explained how this was done:

Talk they did. By 1633 the combined efforts of the growers and the connoisseurs, the
rhizotomi
and the apothecaries, had all but solved the old problem of scarcity. Tulips were at last widely available throughout the Netherlands. A total of some five hundred different varieties were by then being grown in the Dutch Republic alone—some superbly fine and extremely rare, but others, still beautiful, rather easier to obtain. And as the supply of bulbs steadily increased, the flower began to attract new admirers among the tradesmen and working men of the Dutch Republic—men who had not until then been able to afford tulips or displayed much interest in the bulb trade.

In part this was the work of the growers. Their most important customers, the connoisseurs, were demanding ever finer and rarer tulips, which left the bulb farmers with the task of disposing of increasing quantities of the older, less spectacular varieties that naturally made up the bulk of their stock. They solved the problem by selling these flowers at low prices to new clients who had heard much excited talk about the beauty of the more fashionable varieties and wanted tulips of their own. Some of the more ambitious growers even took to offering unwanted bulbs to members of the army of peddlers who traveled from town to town selling their wares at local fairs and markets. These men hawked the flowers far and wide. They
helped to introduce the ruder varieties to farmers, laborers, and polder boys out in the countryside and spread the gospel of the tulip far and wide.

In greater measure, though, the interest that many Dutchmen now developed in the flower trade owed less to the tulip’s natural beauty than to the dawning realization that money could be made in bulbs. That was something worth investigating. For money, despite the enormous wealth now flowing into the republic, was something many of its citizens saw all too little of.

F
oreigners who marveled at the wealth the Dutch enjoyed during their Golden Age never ceased to wonder how they did it. The regents and great merchants of the United Provinces might be rich, but the country they lived in was one of the poorest places in Europe. Few other nations were quite so lacking in fertile land, charming countryside, and a pleasant climate as the Dutch Republic; from the war-ravaged territories of the south to the immense peat bogs that sprawled across the northern provinces, there was almost nothing to suggest that this was a land of any promise.

Here was a nation described by one scornful Englishman as “an universall quagmire … the buttock of the world,” a country whose greatest city—Amsterdam—had been built on a swamp and could be reached only by braving the Zuider Zee, a fifty-mile-long inland sea full of sandbanks and treacherous shallows. It was a place where the air, in the words of the English ambassador, Sir William Temple, “would be all Fog and Mist, if it were not clear’d by the sharpness of their Frosts,” where the weather was “violent and surprising” and was so unhealthy, chill, and damp that it seemed to breed fevers and
plague. For the regents of the Dutch Republic, money made this situation tolerable. Farmers, too, did well during the Golden Age—there were many mouths to feed in the republic, and there was additional demand for their produce from the Holy Roman Empire, where the Thirty Years’ War between the Protestant north and the Catholic south raged from 1618 to 1648, devastating local agriculture. But for ordinary workers—the weavers and carpenters, smiths, cobblers, and market tradesmen who lived in the towns and made up what the Dutch called the artisan class—life in the United Provinces could be very hard.

In the seventeenth century almost all Dutch artisans worked long hours for low wages. When the day’s work was done and they could finally go home, it was to cramped and sparsely furnished one-or two-room houses that were in such short supply that rents were high. Even the national diet was monotonous. To people trapped in an existence such as this, the idea that one could earn a good living by planting bulbs and sitting back to watch them grow must have been irresistible.

For many years most artisans had begun their working day before dawn and finished it after dusk. By 1630 the clamor that arose from city workshops as they opened for business in the small hours of the morning was so great that several towns had been forced to pass decrees forbidding fullers from beginning work before two in the morning, and hatters from starting any earlier than four. Blacksmiths suffered the greatest restrictions; their smithies were so noisy they remained closed by order until the bell that announced daybreak had been rung.

During these long days Dutch artisans were sustained by nothing more than snacks of cheese and raw pickled herring and a dinner, taken in the middle of the day, which typically consisted of the national dish, a meat stew known as
hutespot
that was made of chopped mutton, parsnips, vinegar, and prunes boiled in fat. A good
hutespot
was
supposed to be left to simmer for at least three hours, but when times were bad and the work was hard, it was often cooked for no more than an hour, so that when served, it was still—in the words of one appalled French visitor—“nothing more than water full of salt or nutmeg, with sweetbreads and minced meat added, having not the slightest flavor of meat.”

For many of the Dutch, though, even a poor
hutespot
was at best an occasional luxury. Those who could not afford meat lived on vegetables and the sticky black rye bread of the time, which was sold in huge loaves weighing twelve pounds or more; in poorer households, the mother might buy a single one of these loaves to feed her whole family for a day. Even when other food was available, Dutch eating habits were generally very conservative. Seafood, for example, almost always meant either herring or cod; mussels, though available, were despised as the poorest sort of food, and the servants at one grand house were so disgusted at being asked to eat salmon that they begged their mistress to promise she would not serve it to them more than twice a week.

With dinner over, work began again immediately and lasted at least until dusk—much later, if it was possible to continue under artificial light. During the Golden Age fourteen-hour days were thought perfectly normal, and at Leiden in 1637 hard-pressed cloth workers who had just worked a sixteen-hour shift needed money so badly that they asked to be put on overtime. Nor was there much time off; everyone worked six days a week, and one of the less welcome results of the Reformation had been the abolition of a good number of holidays that had previously been celebrated on saints’ days.

The artisans rarely complained about this because they were paid by the hour. The money they could earn thus varied according to the number of hours it was possible to labor in a week, so a job that generated a little surplus income in the summer might become one that paid not much better than starvation wages when the days closed
in for winter. Even when times were good and the days were long, the pay in most jobs amounted to something between half a stuiver and two stuivers an hour, and hundreds of thousands of Dutchmen worked long and hard for a guilder a day or a little less. The upshot was that at a time when Sunday working was not permitted and a family of five needed a minimum income of 280 guilders a year simply to avoid starvation, a Dutch artisan in regular work often expected to earn an annual wage of no more than 300 guilders.