Composition 11

Is there any wonder the tulip drove the Dutch mad?

Their sumptuous colours, their shapes, their sinuous sensuality, their sophistication have always made them the botanical symbol of elegant extravagance. The Dutch prized all this about them, their flamboyance, the subtlety of their colour combinations. They were seduced. They named the tulips after generals and admirals, the grandest of all, Semper Augustus, they named after an emperor, and at the height of the madness, the average price of a bulb was 15,000 stuivers, twice the annual salary of a skilled shipwright. But it all went too far and gave the tulip a financial value that nothing could sustain

In this panorama, we are invited to do as the Dutch did: marvel at the tulips’ magnificence in open-jawed wonder. We wallow in their beauty and embrace every blousy, extrovert, attention-grabbing bloom, be they red, yellow, pink or polychrome, feathered, stripy or even slightly faded.

The surroundings in this work echo the flowers; a rococo bowl of equal flamboyance and exquisite drapes in royal blue velvet and gold damask which mirror the flowers’ exuberance. But look for a minute at the plinth they sit on. A weighty, serious tome, perhaps a reminder, when celebrating this most effusive of flowers, that we should never entirely succumb to the sensuous, never be entirely seduced by the aesthetic, and that wisdom should, in the end, always prevail.