Fortune and Folly: A Pandemic Reminiscence

Our upcoming exhibition at The New York Public Library (NYPL), “Fortune and Folly in 1720,” came about fortuitously. Chatting between sessions at an academic conference in Fall 2017, Meredith Martin and Nina Dubin alighted upon the idea of organizing an event and publication to mark the tercentenary of 1720. Not only did this watershed year witness the first international financial meltdown, precipitated by the collapse of the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles. It also marked the arrival of a Great Plague at the French port of Marseille, ultimately killing nearly half the city’s population and compounding fears of the risks posed by an interconnected world. Almost immediately, the two catastrophes became linked in contemporaneous imaginations, uncannily presaging our own calamitous circumstances in the year of their commemoration.¹

As art historians, Meredith and Nina wanted to focus on representations of the disasters, particularly caricatures of the bubbles whose proliferation paralleled the spread of what commentators described as an infectious speculation bug. Most notable in this regard is Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid (“The Great Mirror of Folly,” or Tafereel), a series of approximately seventy satirical etchings published by an anonymous consortium of Amsterdam-based printmakers beginning in late 1720.² Drawing on earlier images by such masters as Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and Jacques Callot, and invoking metaphors of illness and contagion, the Tafereel’s prints ridicule malevolent traders and hoodwinked investors, some of whom defecate stock shares or undergo the surgical removal of stones from their brains (Fig. 1). Others engage in irrational, money-crazed “herd behavior,” cramming into carts headed to the insane asylum or clambering up cliffs and then toppling off of them (Fig. 2). Many of the volume’s caricatures parody the frenzied commerce in stock shares and banknotes as a trade in nothing more substantial than “wind,” evoked in levitating figures, windmills, flatulence, and other emblems of airy nothingness and toxic fumes (Fig. 3). While encapsulating the mania surrounding the bubbles, the Tafereel also gives them narrative sense, thereby offering audiences an entertaining primer on the otherwise bewildering events of modern financial life.

Figure 1.

The Tower of Babel of the Confused Stockholders, 1720. Etching and engraving, 35.4 × 40 cm. Print Collection, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

By summer 2018, Meredith and Nina had written a proposal for a two-day scholarly workshop on “1720, financial disaster, and the visual arts” and had planned to co-edit a special issue on the same topic for Journal18.³ Along the way they fantasized about the possibility of an exhibition, centered on the Tafereel prints, that would vivify the historical significance and ongoing relevance of 1720 for a broad public. But it was not until Meredith and Madeleine Viljoen, the NYPL’s curator of prints and the Spencer Collection, met serendipitously at the end of that summer that this aspect of the project was launched. Hearing Meredith describe the Tafereel over lunch near the NYPL, Madeleine recalled that a few years prior, her colleague David Christie—knowing that she had worked on the depiction of wind in early modern ornament prints—had alerted her to the existence of several copies of the volume along with a trove of South Sea and Mississippi Bubble-related material in the Library’s collection.⁴ (With the help of print department intern Kendall Musgrave, she had had the material catalogued and made widely available on the Library’s website.) A quick post-lunch visit to the print study room confirmed Madeleine’s memory and added to the burgeoning excitement of making the exhibition a reality.

Figure 2.

The Shop of the Stock Boys, Gives Pleasure and Sorrow in Stealing (detail), 1720. Etching and engraving, 44.3 × 33.3 cm. Print Collection, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden...