Did you know that before the stock market bubble of 1929, before the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s/2000s, before the housing bubble of 2008, there was the Tulip Bubble of 1634-37?
True story!
"Tulipmania," as it is known, occurred during the Dutch Golden Age, when a tulip bulb was worth as much as ten times that of a skilled craftsman.
“At no time was this truer than during the tulipmania that swept Amsterdam between 1634 and 1637, when a single bulb of the most prized tulips fetched a price greater than the grandest canal houses in the city. This brief paroxysm of aesthetic zeal and financial speculation brought the nation’s economy to its knees, wiping out the fortunes of many and, for a time, making the flower into a national villain.” -- The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World.
Tulipmania is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble. The term "tulip mania" is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values.
Mary Lamery is a lifelong resident and native of the Pacific Northwest. Lamery paints regional landscape in a manner that leans towards 19th century French Impressionism. Through her project, "Washington Americana," she will create original landscape paintings from her journeys through Washington for the creation of an art book of painted landscape of Washington State.
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