Roots of the problem

When Brueghel was at work on his still life, between 1608 and 1610, this bubble was still decades away from bursting. Brueghel and his specialist contemporaries, such as Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, painted flowers in order to cater for the new and fashionable interest in horticulture that was preoccupying gentlemen botanists and wealthy connoisseurs. One of their leaders was the pioneering botanist Carolus Clusius, who established an important botanical garden at the University of Leiden during the 1590s.

Clusius also had a private garden at Leiden, and it was here that he planted his own collection of tulip bulbs. At that time, tulips, which originally hailed from the Pamir and Tien Shan mountain ranges in central Asia, and had already been cultivated by besotted gardeners in the Ottoman Empire for decades, were rare and exotic newcomers to Western Europe. They were hard to get hold of, and quickly became desired by other scholars besides Clusius.

Clusius devoted a large proportion of his final years to studying tulips. He was especially interested in understanding how and why, from one year to the next, a particular bulb could suddenly ‘break’. This meant that, inexplicably, it would go from producing blooms of a single colour to flowers boasting beautiful feathery or flame-like patterns involving more than one hue.

Much later, during the 19th Century, it was discovered that this striated effect was actually the result of a virus. But, in the 17th Century, this was still not understood, and so, strangely enough, diseased tulips, emblazoned with distinctive patterns, became more prized than healthy ones in the Dutch Republic. Dutch botanists competed to breed ever more beautiful hybrid varieties, known as ‘cultivars’.

In the early 17th Century, these cultivars began to be exchanged among a growing network of gentlemen scholars, who swapped cuttings, seeds and bulbs both within the Netherlands and internationally. “As that network grew,” explains Betsy Wieseman, the curator of Dutch Flowers at the National Gallery, “it became less of a friendship network, and the scholars started getting requests from people they didn’t know. So they started trading for money. And as that network grew and grew, it became increasingly fragile.”

Strange bunch

The expanding interest in tulips coincided with an especially prosperous period in the history of the United Provinces, which, by the 17th Century, dominated world trade and had become the richest country in Europe. As a result, not only aristocratic citizens but also wealthy merchants and even middle-class artisans and tradesmen suddenly found that they had spare cash to spend on luxuries such as expensive flowers.