Tulipomania - Mike Dash [90]
The tulip mania thus ended, as the Court of Holland had wished, not in a flurry of expensive legal actions but in grudging compromise. In the end it had been a craze of the poor and the ambitious that—contrary to popular belief—had virtually no impact on the Dutch economy. No general recession followed in its wake, and the vast majority of florists emerged from the liquidation shaken and chastened but little better or worse off than they had been before the mania began. Their paper profits and their paper losses effectively canceled each other out, and even the richest florists were never formally punished for defaulting on their obligations.
Indeed, by far the most striking thing about the handful of cases that did find their way into the hands of the lawyers of the province was that there were no celebrated trials, no verdicts, and no records of any convictions. The growers and their customers invariably settled their differences out of court. Even in Amsterdam the liquidation of the mania was not a legal matter but a process of compromise and reconciliation agreed by the florists themselves.
The last known case resulting from the bulb craze was heard in Haarlem on January 24, 1639. A grower named Bruyn den Dubbleden demanded 2,100 guilders from his customer Jan Korver, of Alkmaar, payment for a pound of Gheele Croonen at 800 guilders and two pounds of Switsers worth 1,300. No verdict is recorded. Presumably this means that den Dubbleden, like other growers, was compelled to settle at 3.5 percent, and that a contract that had been worth seven years’ wages to a Haarlem artisan only a couple of years earlier was canceled for a payment of 73 guilders 10 stuivers.
Even now a tiny minority of cases remained unsettled for reasons that have been lost to history. The hapless artist Jan van Goyen was one of the unfortunate few who continued to suffer for dabbling in the bulb trade. For the rest of his life burgomaster van Ravensteyn pursued his former customer relentlessly for the whole of the money he was owed. Van Goyen handed over one of the pictures he had promised, but he had invested almost all his available capital in tulips, and with the crash in prices he no longer had any prospect of repaying his debts. Having produced little art in the three years he had devoted to speculating in the property and bulb markets, the painter was forced to return to his easel to feed his family.
The simple pressure of earning a living for his family made it impossible for van Goyen to pay off all his debts to van Ravensteyn, and when the burgomaster died in 1641, he still had not received most of his money. Even then the artist received no respite; van Raven-steyn’s heirs continued to demand payment. The pressure on van Goyen proved so unremitting that his precarious finances collapsed into disorder, and he was forced to organize public auctions of his work on at least two occasions when he needed money in a hurry.
Jan van Goyen lived on until 1656, two decades after the collapse of the bulb craze that had ruined him, and he was still insolvent when he died. He left a substantial body of brilliant landscapes, many of which would probably never have been painted had he made his fortune in the tulip trade, and a debt that still totaled 897 guilders.
He was the last known victim of the tulip mania.
CHAPTER 15
At the Court of the Tulip King
The final liquidation of the Dutch mania at the beginning of 1639 left many Hollanders with a distinct aversion to tulips. The episode did not entirely put off the wealthiest collectors of the rarest bulbs; they had never really been involved in the tavern trade in any case and could thus afford to ignore the ridicule that the pamphleteers heaped on those who had found themselves caught up in the frenzy. These few continued to pay high prices for individual bulbs for another hundred