Tulip frenzy

by Jean Leon Gerome. Here is a comment on the painting from http://www.soenyun.com/Blog/tag/tulip-mania/

The scene takes place dur­ing the 1630s tulip mania and shows a sol­dier guard­ing a pot­ted tulip, while other troops stomp out fields of flow­er­ing bulbs. The piece was painted in 1882 dur­ing a time of eco­nomic dis­tress around the Paris Bourse Crash, a time even more eco­nom­i­cally unset­tled than our own. Gérôme was paint­ing tulips and the tulip folly alright, but he was also com­ment­ing on his own day, which saw a great stock mar­ket crash three and a half cen­turies after the col­lapse of tulip values.