A Tulip Mania Painting

Dated 1635, this exceptionally elaborate flower piece belongs to the very beginning of Jacob Marrel’s documented career as a painter of floral still lifes. Marrel had settled in Utrecht in the early 1630s, and his earliest known dated paintings are from 1634. A self-portrait dated 1635 records his age as twenty-one, making the present work an ambitious achievement by an artist still at the outset of his career. His earliest flower pieces reveal the impact of the Utrecht tradition represented by Roelant Savery (1576-1639), Balthasar van der Ast (1593-1657) and, in particular, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Younger (1609-1645).

What immediately stands out are the spectacular broken/flamed tulips: the large red-and-white example at the top is the Semper Augustus tulip. The Semper Augustus was the most famous and generally regarded as the most valuable tulip of the Tulip Mania. At the height of the market in 1635-1637, a Semper Augustus was reportedly valued and offered at around 10,000 guilders for a single bulb – roughly the price of one of Amsterdam’s grandest canal houses.

Jacob Marrel is directly connected with the Tulip Mania, and his work is among the most artistic documents of the phenomenon. The date 1635 gives the painting exceptional historical resonance. It predates the peak of the Tulip Mania by about two years, while showing precisely the highly prized broken tulips that subsequently became objects of extreme speculation.