Amsterdam, The Netherlands – Tulips & Rembrandt

This photo shows an Ice Cream tulip. It looks like a pink bowl with a heap of vanilla ice cream on top, though it is a flower. I was wondering how it could be so different from all the other tulips, because they all usually have the same shape, and this stuck out from the others because it was such a weird shape. The flower market was pretty big, and this was not the only flower vendor in the market. There were a lot of people there, especially tourists. We were there not only to enjoy looking at the flowers, but also to get a present for my Nana that we could ship back to America, because she has a garden and loves flowers.

The flower market in Amsterdam is one of its biggest tourist attractions. Everyone comes to gawk at the many colors and varieties of tulips, long associated with The Netherlands. Back in the height of the “tulip mania” in the 1630s, tulip bulbs were so prized that they were even traded like currency or futures, until the market for them crashed. When I noticed some tulip bulbs in the market sold with a portrait of Rembrandt, one of the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age of painting, I groaned. But later that same day we went to the Rembrandt House museum, and I was reminded of Rembrandt’s own rise and fall (he went bankrupt in the 1650s). Then I remembered how Rembrandt and his family helped find creative ways for him to earn money in his later years. It made me realize that if licensing his own image existed back then, Rembrandt would probably would have done it.