Tulipomania - Mike Dash [41]
Only two years after the Florilegium first appeared, a Dutch artist named Chrispijn van de Passe produced a similar book called the Hortus Floridus. Van de Passe, the son of a Flemish engraver, was only seventeen years old when his book appeared, but it proved to be one of the most successful botanical works of the age and was quickly translated from the original Latin into French, English, and Dutch. The Dutch edition featured a list of the leading tulip enthusiasts of the early seventeenth century, and later impressions included an appendix devoted entirely to the flower, showing that a lively trade in bulbs already existed between the United Provinces and Germany.
It was not long before the Hortus Floridus began to serve as a handy catalog for nurserymen who did not enjoy the luxury of a wealthy patron willing to bankroll the production of a book such as the Florilegium. But there was a limit to the usefulness of a general printed catalog, particularly in the early days of the tulip trade, when every grower offered his own unique varieties for sale. This problem was solved by the introduction of one of the most notable traditions of the bulb craze—the production of richly illustrated, privately commissioned manuscripts called tulip books. A significant number of these albums were produced for individual Dutch horticulturalists and nearly fifty are known today; they were anything up to five hundred pages long and typically contained one illustration per page, executed in watercolor or gouache. Each picture was generally accompanied by the tulip’s name but only very occasionally by any information regarding price. There is a suspicion that bulb growers, like many modern-day antique dealers, preferred to price their bulbs according to their assessment of their customers’ wealth.
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.