Tulipomania - Mike Dash [31]
The few Dutch connoisseurs who were not regents were rich merchants, some of whom were at least as wealthy as their compatriots, but who nevertheless earned their living by taking an active part in the running of some business or other. The men of this class were generally accorded an honorific title that recognized their particular calling—so that a man named, for example, de Jonge who was involved in the fisheries would be known as “Seigneur de Jonge in Herring”—and they tended to reinvest the profits they made in their own businesses. They had less time for their gardens than did the regents, but even so, a number of the richest merchants did become noted tulip lovers.
The flower was, in fact, perfectly suited to the United Provinces. It was not only fashionable and far more delicately colored than other garden plants; it was also unusually hardy, which meant that novices as well as expert horticulturalists could grow it successfully. The bulbs, moreover, flourished best in poor, sandy soils of the sort found in several parts of the republic and particularly in Holland, where a belt of dry, white earth ran parallel with the coast all the way from Leiden up to the city of Haarlem, just to the west of Amsterdam, and then on to Alkmaar, at the northern tip of the province.
What mattered most, however, was the tulip’s new status as a symbol of wealth and good taste. Beginning in about 1600 the United Provinces became, quite unexpectedly, by far the richest country in Europe. For more than half a century enormous sums of money poured into the country, greatly expanding the ranks of wealthy merchants. These men could afford to spend lavishly on things of beauty.
A number of contemporary writers have preserved the names of some of the wealthy Dutch connoisseurs who collected tulips in the first decades of the seventeenth century. They include several of the richest and most influential people in Holland—men such as Paulus van Beresteyn of Haarlem, who was once the regent of the local leper house, and who grew tulips within the city walls; and Jacques de Gheyn, a wealthy painter from The Hague. De Gheyn was a well-known patrician and an acquaintance of Clusius’s who was sufficiently passionate about gardening to complete a volume of flower paintings, twenty-two pages long, that he sold to the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II. He was one of the few well-off connoisseurs whose real wealth is known with some accuracy, since he had his capital formally assessed in 1627, two years before his death. This audit showed he was then worth no less than forty thousand guilders.
Another tulipophile whose name figures in old records was far wealthier than van Beresteyn and de Gheyn together. Indeed, Guillelmo Bartolotti van de Heuvel (who was actually thoroughly Dutch and owed his bizarre name to the fact that he had been adopted by a childless uncle from Bologna) was one of the two richest men in all Amsterdam, and with assets worth a staggering 400,000 guilders in total, he was quite probably the wealthiest private individual ever to participate in the tulip trade. Having built his fortune in trade, van de Heuvel could afford to devote his leisure time to cultivating a celebrated garden right in the center of Amsterdam. From the scant descriptions that have survived, it appears it was laid out to a highly symmetrical and fiercely formal plan. Almost certainly it would have been the garden of a true connoisseur, following the contemporary fashion for flowers to be planted one to a bed so they could be admired in splendid isolation.
The vast influx of wealth that made a rich man of Guillelmo van de Heuvel was primarily a consequence of the Dutch Revolt.