tulip mania paintings

Here’s a really inter­est­ing paint­ing that I encoun­tered Sun­day while I was vis­it­ing the Getty Museum. It’s “The Tulip Folly,” by the 19th cen­tury French aca­d­e­mic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was hav­ing a big show in one of the gal­leries. (The paint­ing was on loan from Baltimore’s Wal­ters Art Museum.)

The scene takes place dur­ing the 1630s tulip mania and shows a sol­dier guard­ing a pot­ted tulip, while other troops stomp out fields of flow­er­ing bulbs. The piece was painted in 1882 dur­ing a time of eco­nomic dis­tress around the Paris Bourse Crash, a time even more eco­nom­i­cally unset­tled than our own. Gérôme was paint­ing tulips and the tulip folly alright, but he was also com­ment­ing on his own day, which saw a great stock mar­ket crash three and a half cen­turies after the col­lapse of tulip values.

While look­ing for images of this paint­ing I ran across a cou­ple other inter­est­ing depic­tions of the tulip mania. Both were painted by Dutch artists closer to the actual tulip mar­ket crash, and both paint­ings reside in Haarlem’s Frans Hals Museum.

Hen­drik Ger­ritsz Pot painted an alle­gory of Flora’s Wagon of Fools around 1640. This paint­ing shows a cart­load of tulip-deranged wackos lead­ing the com­mon work­ers into the sea. Sub­sti­tute Wall Street bankers for the tulip-snorting loonies and I think it has spe­cial res­o­nance for us today.

Jean Brueghel the Younger’s Satire of the Tulip Frenzy is even unkinder towards the par­tic­i­pants in the frenzy. They appear in the paint­ing as mon­keys. Smack!

As unflat­ter­ing as the spec­u­la­tors appear, in some ways the pre­vi­ous image of Flora’s wagon comes off as being a stronger indict­ment of the dam­age done to a gen­eral pop­u­la­tion by a mon­eyed elite. Still, Brueghel’s mon­keys are pretty wild and I like his work bet­ter as a painting.

Some­times I feel a lit­tle silly chas­ing after an unusual plant that I absolutely must have. (If you hear of a land run on San Diego rag­weed, I might have some­thing to do with it…) Maybe these images, com­bined with the expe­ri­ence of our cur­rent eco­nomic times, will slap a lit­tle bit of san­ity into me.

August 04 2010 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: • • • • • | 7 Comments »