Each of the 104 pages in Nicolaes Tulp’s book of tulips contains a watercolour painted by the artist Jacob Marrel, with a record of the market values of the bulbs at the height of 17th-century tulip mania, the world’s first speculation bubble.
The catalogue bears testament to a period in the 1630s when the Netherlands was the richest country in the world and single tulip bulbs would sell for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled worker. However, the market crashed dramatically in 1637.
Four centuries on, market forces have had their way again. The catalogue, now valued at €750,000 by Sotheby’s, faces being sold abroad to the highest bidder by one of Tulp’s descendants, unless an appeal aimed at saving it for the Dutch nation manages to attract sufficient funds.
To block the plan to sell the book abroad, a crowdfunding effort has been launched by Jan Six van Hillegom X, another descendant of Tulp, who is furious about the move to sell it overseas.
The 72-year-old had taken out a loan to allow him to take ownership of the book with a view to putting it on public display in the Six Collection, the family’s state-backed foundation. But the loan is due to be repaid in full on 31 December Jan Six’s mission is to find 104 sponsors – one per page – to donate €7,500 each to save the book for the Netherlands.
“I can’t afford to put that money down on my own,” he said. “If we don’t get the numbers, then I don’t think it is necessary to keep it in Holland; [it would show] there is no interest in it. I will take it to Saudi Arabia and sell it to a sheikh. But that would be a dark page for me.
“It has been in the family for seven generations, However, it did not go to my grandfather [who donated the inheritance to the foundation] but to another branch of the family and they say that there is so much in the family foundation already, we don’t like to add everything,” he said. “They want to sell it, but I want to keep this in Holland. It is the life of Nicolaes Tulp, an ancestor.”
Tulp, a surgeon and sometime mayor of Amsterdam, who sat for Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, was born Claes Pieterszoon but changed his name to Nicolaes Tulp after the tulips that grew near his home. He handed the book down to his children on his death in 1674. His family is one of the oldest in the Netherlands, but is now split over the fate of his catalogue.
Six said last week that his appeal had so far attracted 43 donations.
“It is a lot of money but, for the next 10 years, we will treat donors to all kinds of nice things, including a facsimile of the book. If I am on 93 donors by the end I think we will manage but I have 43 now.”
He said he hoped to show the book alongside certain other of Tulp’s belongings, including his golden goblet, his coins and medals and his writings. “That brings emotion to art,” he said. “You see a painting, OK, that’s nice, not nice. But if you see the man on the wall, the chair he sat on, the map he wrote on? That is a story. That is history.”