Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society » The Worst Excess of Tulipomania

April 13th, 2006

The Worst Excess of Tulipomania

In 1624, only a dozen examples of this flower, Semper Augustus, were said to exist. They were all owned by a single anonymous individual who refused to part with any of them:

In time, however, the collector did sell one bulb, only to discover that, when it was lifted from the ground, it had two offsets. By this means, Semper Augustus gradually became available, even though, by the time the market collapsed, the number of bulbs probably never was much greater than it had been originally.

Because Semper Augustus was scarce, it was coveted and because it was desirable, it was expensive. That rarity was reflected in the price, 1,000, 1,200, 2,000 guilders all having been quoted for a single bulb. In 1633, one was said to have sold for 5,500 guilders; in 1637, just before the crash, a price of 10,000 guilders was asked, an exorbitant amount that would have purchased a grand home on the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam.

…

The basic unit of currency in the Dutch Republic was the guilder, denoted by fl (florin), which, in 1638, had a gold content of 0.77 grams. The Semper Augustus that purportedly sold for 5,500 guilders, therefore, would have had an equivalent weight in gold equal to $67,225 (evaluated at $450 per ounce), and this at a time when the purchasing power would have been much greater. Although it is difficult to make meaningful comparisons between monetary values in the Netherlands in the first half of the seventeenth-century and the present, salaries and prices do provide one means. The annual earnings of a carpenter or cloth shearer, for example, were about 250 fl, a well-to-do merchant might earn from 1,500 to 3,000 fl a year. Clusius, while at the University of Leiden, had an annual salary of 750 fl a year, and the fee charged by Rembrandt for his imposing masterpiece The Night Watch (1642) was 1,600 fl.

We recommend Mike Dash’s book, Tulipomania : The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused and The Tulip by Anna Pavord.

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The Worst Excess of Tulipomania

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