Tulips are all around us when spring arrives. From endless fields in all kinds of beautiful colors, in flower stalls on the corner of the street to flaunting in a vase. A feast for the eyes that unfortunately only lasts a while. But don’t worry, on many samplers that have been embroidered over the centuries, it is always tulip time.
Love sickness
Anyone who thinks that the tulip is a typical “Dutch” product is sadly mistaken. “Our pride” comes from Persia, where the tulip is a wild flower.
Bathing Shirin, illustration eighteenth century handwriting
An oriental legend from the thirteenth century tells of a youth named Farhard, who fell in love with the Persian princess Shirin. She rejected him. Farhard went into the desert with a broken heart. The tears he shed turned into tulips as soon as they touched the warm, dry sand. These wild flowers, called ‘lalé’ in Persia, became the symbol of perfect love. They were dug up and planted in the royal gardens. Gardens with fragrant flowers were then also laid out in Turkey. The tulip took an increasingly important place in it, it even became the national flower of Turkey.
Flora’s Malle Wagen, Allegory of Tulpomania, Hendrik Pot, 1640, Frans Hals Museum Collection
The road to Europe
In 1562 the first tulip bulbs are shipped from Constantinople to Antwerp, from where they end up in the Northern Netherlands. They cause a craze, a very expensive one in fact: the tulip fever breaks out in full force. The bulbs cost a fortune and destroy many a merchant. The tulip is the most common flower in flower still lifes from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tulips are also applied to all kinds of textiles and furniture, not to mention wall tiles, tile pictures and Delft blue pottery. The tulip is also a frequently used motif in folk art. It is therefore not surprising that it appears on many samplers. In all shapes and sizes, from single tulips on long stems to tulips in a vase or pot, with or without roses and carnations.
Tulip and Spider, Bartholomeus Assteyn, drawing, 1650-1670, Amsterdam Museum collection
Say it with tulips
The symbolism is almost as rich. In the seventeenth century the tulip is directed to God. If the sun doesn’t shine, the tulip fades; when the sun does shine, it has its long straight stem turned to the sky. Later in the same century, this changes into transience. The tulip has only a short life. It is a vanitas symbol: man is mortal.
Maeghde Weapon, from Houwelyck, Jacob Cats, 1625
According to Jacob Cats, the tulip refers to chastity. In Houwelyck (1625), a work by his hand, the first part ‘Maeght’ includes a ‘Maeghde weapon’; a diamond-shaped coat of arms with one closed tulip in a pot decorated with dancing putti, around which bees swarm. The shield is carried by two young women, one of whom carries an embroidery frame with an unfinished embroidery on her right arm. The motto is: ‘lateat dum pateat’, let her be closed while she shows herself. The closed flower represents virginity.
Tile, Delft, ca. 1630 and Pattern from Merk en Stopmatten from the Burgerweeshuis of Amsterdam, Berthi Smith-Sanders
The road to the sampler
The tulips on tiles may have been the example for many cross stitch patterns. The ‘triple tulip’ was popular from the seventeenth century until well into the nineteenth century. It is a large long-stemmed tulip flanked by two smaller ones. Another motif is the flower pot with a tulip in the middle and to the left and right of it a carnation and a rose. Here the tulip is the symbol of perfect love, the rose of the love between husband and wife and the carnation of maternal love. These images find their way directly to the sampler. Whether the still young embroiderers were aware of the symbolic charge cannot be said with certainty. The flowers may have been scattered on the cloths purely for their beauty. But be that as it may, for four centuries we have been under the spell of the tulip, one of our most important export products.