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By Root 195 0

know about involved Jan van Goyen, a well-known artist who was the most influential painter of landscapes in the whole of the United Provinces. Van Goyen was the son of a shoemaker, and his success as an artist had brought him a prosperity he could hardly have imagined in his youth. His father, a keen amateur artist who was at least affluent enough to own his own house, had suffered from fits of insanity and eventually had to be confined to the asylum at Leiden, leaving Jan to put himself through an apprenticeship with the Haarlem master Esaias van de Velde and make a name for himself with his paintings of sand dunes and river scenes. Although never really wealthy, he used the money that he earned to speculate in property and then in tulips, buying ten bulbs from Albert van Ravensteyn, the burgomaster of The Hague, on January 27, 1637, and then forty more eight days later for the combined sum of 912 guilders and two of his own paintings. The latter deal, agreed the day after the crash in Haarlem, was by far the bigger, being worth a total of 858 guilders. But shortly after the painter had agreed to buy the flowers, the market in The Hague slumped too, and van Goyen soon found himself in desperate financial difficulty.

The desperation of the bulb dealers was exacerbated by the fact that the great majority of florists had participated, like Gaergoedt, in the windhandel, and when the market collapsed, they still remained liable to fulfill the futures contracts they had agreed to. Practically every trader had put down deposits on tulips that were now worthless yet they would be expected to pay substantial additional sums to complete the purchases when the bulbs were lifted in only a few months’ time. Many had little choice but to default.

The collapse of the tulip trade thus had serious implications even for those who had sold their bulbs before the crash and appeared to have walked away with good profits. Among those affected in this way were the orphans of Wouter Winkel, who found themselves embroiled in at least two legal actions as a result of the Alkmaar auction. One involved a local dealer named Gerrit Amsterdam, who attempted to claim that the Verbeterde Boterman bulb of 563 aces that he had purchased for 263 guilders had turned out to be nothing but a common Boterman, worth far less than he had paid. The other concerned Willem Lourisz., a florist from Heemskerk, just outside Haarlem. He had bid 512 guilders for a bulb of a Rosen variety called Anvers Vestus, the money to be paid when the tulip had flowered satisfactorily. A year and a half after the auction, Lourisz. still had not discharged his debt, and Jacob van der Meer and Jacob van der Gheest, the two regents of the Alkmaar orphanage who acted as guardians of the Winkel children, took him to court for nonpayment. The regents swore that they had invited the florist repeatedly to inspect his flower and settle his debt. Lourisz.’s defense—and it sounds a flimsy one—was that he had made an appointment to meet van der Meer outside the garden where the bulb was growing one morning in May 1637, that the regent had failed to show up, and that after waiting half an hour the florist had left. Van der Meer indignantly countered that there had never been an appointment, that the tulip had flowered magnificently and had been available for inspection for several weeks, and that it should be paid for as agreed.

The position of the growers was a little better than that of the florists. Even after the tavern trade had come to a halt, connoisseurs did continue to pay extraordinary prices for tulips. On March 17 a Haarlem merchant named Dirck Boortens sold a quantity of bulbs including an Admirael Liefkens and a Saeyblom to one Pieter van Welsen for no less than 11,700 guilders. Van Welsen went to inspect his flowers in the middle of April and discovered some of them were in poor condition, so Boortens agreed to knock three hundred guilders off the original price. Van Welsen cannot have been too worried about the collapse of the tulip colleges, for he confirmed that he was still