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.