Tulip Fever

Stories about the tulip fever of 1636/37 paint an astonishing picture, yet the truth is rather more prosaic. No one bought a house on an Amsterdam waterfront for the price of a tulip bulb, there were no sensational bankruptcies and no one leaped to a tragic death in a canal. The highest bid for a Viceroy tulip bulb in February 1637 - 4,200 guilders - was likely never paid, since that was when the market crashed. Why the market crashed is a mystery. A tulip glut? Doubts about their quality (since the bulbs still lay in the ground)? The effects of the plague that took so many tulip growers? The inevitable collapse of an overheated market? This book explains what actually happened in the first half of the seventeenth century, how tulips evolved from a sought-after collector's item, to a commercial product, to a speculative object. How traders originally traded in flowering bulbs, then in bulbs, and finally in bulbs that still lay in the soil and might be sold on several times by speculators in the hope of an ever-higher profit. And what happened, and didn't happen when the market crashed in February 1637, to the delight of scornful artists and composers of satirical rhymes. 

This book accompanies Tulip Fever - 1636-1637 - The True Story, an exhibition hosted by Musum de Zwarte Tul in Lisse from 18th March to 17 August 2023.