Author Archives: One Hundred Guilders

About One Hundred Guilders

One hundred guilders was the amount of money that the people depicted in the Nightwatch had to pay Rembrandt. (Except for the officers, who paid a little more.) Leading up to the Amsterdam Museumnight on 5 November, during which the Exchanghibition Bank will hold office in the Rijksmuseum, junior curators Anne Lenders and Tristan Mostert of the Rijksmuseum will blog about the interplay between art and money in the days when art wasn't modern and money was not made of coloured paper (most of the time.)

Art as a trade good: printed paper bound for China in the late 16th century

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'Fire', from a series of the four elements. Print rediscovered on Nova Zembla. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

At the end of the 16th century, the freshly independent Netherlands were bent on building up their own international trade network, and were casting their eyes on Asia. China particularly held their interest. They knew almost nothing of empire in the Far East; what they did know was that the Portuguese, with whom they were at war, were trading there, and were making spectacular profits.

In order to reach China, but circumvent the Portuguese route around Africa, the Dutch decided to try a northeastern route, straight through the Arctic, where they hoped to be able to sail through during the summer. However, all three attempts, undertaken between 1594 and 1597, failed. The third one ended in outright disaster: one of the ships got stuck in the ice on the northeast coast of Nova Zembla and was pushed out of the water by the drifting ice. The crew had to spend the winter in the Arctic, but most of them ultimately managed to get back alive in two open boats – their story is still well-known in the Netherlands.

When setting off to trade with a country you know almost nothing about, what to bring as trade goods? The Dutch knew little of China. The Portuguese, so the Dutch had learned, mainly paid for their silk, pearls, gold and porcelains there with silver. So the expedition ships took that with them, as well as a various manufactured products and a clock, of which the Dutch also knew that these were in demand in China.

The organizers of the expedition, however, had also gotten the notion somewhere that European prints might be in demand in the East. So they brought piles and piles of those. When the expedititon failed and the crew had to return in their open boats, they left them behind on Nova Zembla.
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Art as the cheap option: 17th century floral still lifes

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Hans Bollongier, Still life with flowers, 1639. Oil on canvas, 67 x 53 cm. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, SK-A-799.

Tulips were extremely fashionable, but extremely rare and expensive in early 17th century Holland. Only the very rich could afford to have freshly cut flowers in their homes. The most wanted tulips were rare of form and had a specific color pattern. Because this fashionable phenomenon also attracted attention beyond the extremely wealthy, floral still lifes were painted. These lasted longer than real flowers, and – incredibly to us – were the cheaper alternative.

The popularity of the tulip increased enormously in the course of the century, which gave rise to increasing prices and speculative trade in bulbs: traders started buying bulbs not with the intention of growing tulips, but treated them as an investment, speculating on a further increase in value. The bulb trade developed into the first recorded case of a market bubble.

Prices really got out of hand from 1634 onwards. For some types of tulips, thousands of guilders per bulb were offered – insane prices, keeping in mind that a teacher or a sailor earned around 150 guilders a year and a good carpenter no more than 300 guilders.

In 1636 bulb traders came up with an innovation: futures. They started circulating contracts which promised to buy bulbs by the end of the growing season. As a consequence, actual bulbs no longer needed to change hands in the transactions. Not unlike today’s international commodity market, the speculative trade became more and more detached from the actual product.

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