Vermeer's Hat
VERMEER’S HAT
‘This is a spellbinding book ... starting from details in five of Vermeer’s paintings, Brook takes readers on a series of brilliantly circuitous mystery tours that reveal the savagery on which western civilisation was built.’ John Carey, Sunday Times
‘Original and stimulating ... Vermeer’s Hat is a jewel of a study of two distinct yet intertwined worlds, feeling their way together towards modernity.’ London Review of Books
‘Brook takes his readers on a journey that encompasses Chinese porcelain and beaver pelts, global temperatures and firearms, shipwrecked sailors, silver mines and Manila galleons. A book full of surprising pleasures.’ Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China
‘In Brook’s hands, Vermeer’s paintings really do become windows on the past, illuminating a fascinating period in which the world was being remade by global trade.’ Tom Standage, author of A History of the World in Six Glasses
‘Thanks to Brook’s roving and insatiably curious gaze, Vermeer’s small scenes widen onto the broad panorama of world history ... a more entertaining guide to world history – and to Vermeer – is difficult to imagine.’ Ross King, author of The Judgment of Paris, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling and Brunelleschi’s Dome
TIMOTHY BROOK is Principal of St John’s College at the University of British Columbia, and holds the Shaw Chair in Chinese Studies at Oxford University. He is the author of many books, including the award-winning Confusions of Pleasure.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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(with Jérôme Bourgon and Gregory Blue)
VERMEER’S HAT
The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn
of the Global World
TIMOTHY BROOK
This paperback edition published in 2009
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
www.profilebooks.com
First published in the United States of America by
Bloomsbury Press, New York
Copyright © Timothy Brook, 2008, 2009
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN: 978-1-84765-254-6
For Fay
Our arrivals at meaning and at value are momentary pauses in the ongoing dialogue with others from which meaning and value spring.
—Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations and Maps
1 The View from Delft
2 Vermeer’s Hat
3 A Dish of Fruit
4 Geography Lessons
5 School for Smoking
6 Weighing Silver
7 Journeys
8 Endings: No Man is an Island
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Chinese and Japanese Publications
Recommended Reading and Sources
Notes
ILLUSTRATIONS
1: Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft (Mauritshuis, The Hague)
2: Johannes Vermeer, Officer and Laughing Girl (Frick Collection, New York)
3: Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden)
4: Johannes Vermeer, The Geographer (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt-am-Main)
5: A plate from the Lambert van Meerten Museum of Delft (Gemeente Musea Delft)
6: Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance (Widener Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)
7: Hendrik Van der Burch, The Card Players (Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John S. Newberry)
8: Leonaert Bramer, The Journey of the Three Magi to Bethlehem (Collection of the New York Historical Society, accession no. 1882.142)
MAPS
The Low Countries, ca. 1650
Trade routes in the Great Lakes region
Global trade routes in the seventeenth century
Trade routes around the South China Sea
1
THE VIEW FROM DELFT
THE SUMMER I was twenty, I bought a bicycle in Amsterdam and cycled southwest across the Low Countries on what would be the final leg of a journey that took me from Dubrovnik on the Adriatic to Ben Nevis in Scotland. I was on my second day out, pedaling across the Dutch countryside, when the light began to fade and the late-afternoon drizzle blowing in off the North Sea turned the road under my tires slick. A truck edged me too close to the verge, and my bicycle went over into the mud. I was not hurt, but I was soaked and filthy and had a bent fender to straighten. Without the shelter of a bridge, which was my usual hobo’s recourse in bad weather, I knocked at the door of the nearest house to ask for a few moments out of the rain. Mrs. Oudshoorn had watched my spill from her front window, which is where I guessed she spent many a long afternoon, so I was not altogether a surprise when she opened her door a crack and peered out at me. She hesitated for a brief moment, then put caution aside and opened the door wide so that this bedraggled young Canadian could come inside.
All I wanted was to stand for a few minutes out of the rain and pull myself together, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She poured me a hot bath, cooked me dinner, gave me a bed to sleep in, and pressed on me several of her dead husband’s things, including a waterproof coat. The next morning, as sunlight poured over her kitchen table, she fed me the best breakfast I ever had eaten and chuckled slyly about how angry her son would be if he ever found out she’d taken in a complete stranger, and a man at that. After breakfast she gave me postcards of local sites to take as mementos and suggested I go see some of them before climbing back on my bicycle and getting back on the road. The sun was shining that Sunday morning, and there was nowhere I had to be, so out I went for a stroll and a look. Her town has stayed with me ever since. Mrs. Oudshoorn gave me more than the hospitality of her home. She gave me Delft.
“A most sweet town, with bridges and a river in every street,” is how the London diarist Samuel Pepys described Delft when he visited in May 1660. The description perfectly fit the town I saw, for Delft has remained largely as it looked in the seventeenth century. Its cobbled streets and narrow bridges were dappled that morning by galleon-shaped clouds scudding in from the North Sea a dozen kilometers to the northwest, and the sunlight reflecting off the canals lit up the brick façades of the houses
. Unlike that far grander canal city, Venice, which Italians built up from the surface of the sea on wooden pilings driven into tidal sandbars, the Dutch built Delft below sea level. Dikes held back the North Sea, and water sluices were dug to drain the coastal fens. This history resides in its name, delven being the Dutch word for digging. The main canal running the length of the western part of the town is still called the Oude Delft, the Old Sluice.
Memories of the seventeenth century are peculiarly present in the two great churches of Delft. On the Great Market Square is Nieuwe Kerk, the New Church, so named because it was founded two centuries after the Oude Kerk, the Old Church on the Oude Delft canal. Both great buildings were built and decorated as Catholic churches, of course (the Old Church in the thirteenth century, the New Church in the fifteenth), though they did not remain so. The light coming through the clear glass in the windows and illuminating their interiors bleaches out that early history in favor of what came later: the purging of Catholic idolatry, including the removal of stained glass in the 1560s, which was part of the Dutch struggle for independence from Spanish rule, and the fashioning of Protestant gathering places of almost civil worship. The floors of both churches belong quite securely to the seventeenth century, for they are covered with inscriptions marking the graves of the wealthier citizens of seventeenth-century Delft. People in those days hoped to be buried as close as possible to a holy place, and better than being buried beside a church was to be interred underneath it. Many of the numerous paintings done of the interiors of these two churches show a lifted paving stone, occasionally even gravediggers at work, while other people (and dogs) go about their business. The churches kept registers of where each family had its grave, but most of the graves bear no written memorial. Only those who could afford the cost had the stones laid over them inscribed with their names and deeds.
It was in the Old Church that I came upon one stone inscribed neatly and sparely: JOHANNES VERMEER 1632–1675. I had stumbled upon the last remains of an artist whose paintings I had just seen and admired in the Rijksmuseum, the national museum in Amsterdam, a few days earlier. I knew nothing about Delft or Vermeer’s connection to the town. Yet suddenly there he was in front of me, awaiting my notice.
Many years later I learned that this paving stone had not been placed over his grave when he died. At that time, Vermeer was not a person of sufficient importance to deserve an inscribed gravestone. He was just a painter, an artisan in one of the fine trades. It is true that Vermeer was a headman of the artisans’ guild of St. Luke, and that he enjoyed a position of honor in the town militia—though that was a distinction he shared with some eighty other men in his neighborhood. Even if there had been money on hand when he died, which there wasn’t, this status did not justify the honor of an inscription. Only in the nineteenth century did collectors and curators come to think of Vermeer’s subtle and elusive paintings as the work of a great artist. The stone there now was not laid until the twentieth century, put down to satisfy the many who, unlike me, knew he was there and came to pay their respects. This slab does not actually mark the place where Vermeer was buried, though, since all the paving stones were taken up and relaid when the church was restored following the great fire of 1921. All we know is that his remains are down there somewhere.
Nothing else of Vermeer’s life in Delft has survived. We know that he grew up in his father’s inn off the Great Market Square, and that he lived most of his adult life in the house of his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, on the Oude Langendijck, or Old Long Dike. This was where he surrounded himself with an ever-growing brood of little children downstairs; painted most of his pictures upstairs; and died suddenly at the age of forty-three, his debts mounting and his wellspring of inspiration gone dry. The house was pulled down in the nineteenth century. Of Vermeer’s life in Delft, nothing tangible is left.
The only way to step into Vermeer’s world is through his paintings, but neither is this possible in Delft. Of the thirty-five paintings that still survive (a thirty-sixth, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, is still missing), not one remains in Delft. They were sold after he died or carted to auctions elsewhere, and now are dispersed among seventeen different galleries from Manhattan to Berlin. The three closest works are in the Mauritshuis, the royal picture gallery in The Hague. These paintings are not far from Delft—The Hague was four hours away by river barge in the seventeenth century but is now only ten minutes by train—but they are no longer where he painted them. To view a Vermeer, you have to be somewhere other than Delft. To be in Delft, you have to forego the opportunity to look at a Vermeer.
Any number of reasons could be introduced to explain why Vermeer had to have come from Delft, from local painting traditions to the character of the light that falls on the town. But these reasons do not allow us to conclude that Vermeer would not have produced paintings just as remarkable had he lived somewhere else in Holland. Context is important, but it doesn’t account for everything. By the same token, I could put forward any number of reasons to explain why a global history of the intercultural transformations of seventeenth-century life must start from Delft. But they wouldn’t convince you that Delft was the only place from which to begin. The fact of the matter is that nothing happened there that particularly changed the course of history, except possibly art history, and I won’t try to claim otherwise. I start from Delft simply because I happen to have fallen off my bike there, because Vermeer happened to have lived there, and because I happen to enjoy looking at his paintings. So long as Delft does not block our view of the seventeenth-century world, these reasons are as good as any for choosing it as a place to stand and consider the view.
Suppose I were to choose another place from which to tell this story: Shanghai, for instance, since my travels took me there several years after that first visit to Delft and led to my becoming a historian of China? It would suit the design of this book, in fact, since Europe and China are the two poles of the magnetic field of interconnection that I describe here. How much would choosing Shanghai over Delft change the story I am about to tell? It’s possible it would not change a great deal. Shanghai was actually rather like Delft, if we want to look for similarities below the obvious differences. Like Delft, Shanghai was built on land that had once been under the ocean, and it depended on water sluices to drain the bogs on which it rests. (The name Shanghai, which could be translated as On the Ocean, is in fact an abbreviation of Shanghaibang, Upper Ocean Sluice.) Shanghai similarly was a walled city (though it was walled only in the mid-sixteenth century to protect it against raiders from Japan). It was crisscrossed with canals and bridges and had direct water access to the ocean. The marketing center for a productive agricultural economy built on the reclaimed land, it too anchored an artisanal network of commodity production in the surrounding countryside (cotton textiles in this instance). Shanghai did not have the urban bourgeoisie whom (and for whom) Vermeer painted, nor perhaps quite the same level of cultivation and sophistication. Its most prominent native son (and Catholic convert) Xu Guangqi complained in a letter of 1612 that Shanghai was a place of “vulgar manners.” Yet Shanghai’s wealthy families engaged in practices of patronage and conspicuous consumption, which included buying and showing paintings, that seem rather like what the merchant elite of Delft were doing. An even more striking coincidence is that Shanghai was the birthplace of Dong Qichang—the greatest painter and calligrapher of his age—who transformed painting conventions and laid the foundations of modern Chinese art. It makes no sense to call Dong the Vermeer of China, or Vermeer the Dong of Holland; but the parallel is too curious to leave unmentioned.
The similarities between Delft and Shanghai may seem superficial when we consider their differences. There was, first of all, the difference of scale: Delft at mid-century had only twenty-five thousand residents, ranking sixth among Dutch cities, whereas Shanghai before the famines and disorder of the 1640s administered an urban population well over twice that number and a rural popul
ation of half a million. More significant were the differences in their political contexts: Delft was an important base for a newly emerging republic that had thrown off the Hapsburg empire of Spain, whereas Shanghai was an administrative seat within the secure control of the Ming and Qing empires.1 Delft and Shanghai must also be distinguished in terms of the state policies that regulated interactions with the outside world. The Dutch government was actively engaged in building trade networks stretching around the globe, whereas the Chinese government maintained an on-again, off-again policy of restricting foreign contact and trade (a policy that was much debated within China). These differences are significant, but if I treat them lightly, it is because they do not much affect my purpose, which is to capture a sense of the larger whole of which both Shanghai and Delft were parts: a world in which people were weaving a web of connections and exchanges as never before. This story stays largely the same, regardless of where one begins telling it.
Choosing Delft over Shanghai has something to do with what has survived. When I fell off a bicycle in Delft, I stepped into a memory of the seventeenth century. Not so when you fall off a bicycle in Shanghai. The past there has been so thoroughly obliterated by first colonialism, then state socialism, and most recently global capitalism, that the only doors that actually open onto the Ming dynasty are on library shelves. A wisp of memory lingers in the little streets around Yuyuan, the Garden of Ease in the heart of what used to be the old city. This garden was founded at the end of the sixteenth century as a retirement gift for the builder’s father, but around it grew up a small public gathering area where, among other things, artists came to hang their works to sell. But the area has been so thoroughly built up in the intervening centuries that there is little to betray what might have existed in the Ming dynasty.