2-701-678 - © National Museum of Wales/Heritage-Images

'Tulips', 1798. Series of botanical illustrations in Dr. Robert John Thornton's Temple of Flora with flowers shown against brooding romantic backgrounds. Originally cultivated in the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey), tulips were imported into Holland in the sixteenth century. In the mid-seventeenth century, tulips were so popular that they created the first economic bubble, known as "Tulip Mania" (tulipomania).