Vermeer's Hat: The seventeenth century and the dawn of the global world

By Timothy Brook

'Effortless and compelling, Brooks is a wonderful storyteller. I doubt I will read a better book this year.' Sunday Telegraph

Each of Vermeer's paintings tells a story. In one, a military officer leans toward a laughing girl; in another, a woman stands by a window and weighs silver; in a third, fruit spills from a porcelain bowl onto a lavish Turkish carpet.

Hiding in plain sight, these details hint at the intricate threads that bound Vermeer's world together - the officer's hat is made from North American beaver, bought with silver extracted from the mines of Peru, while beaver pelts were traded in their thousands for the Chinese porcelain so beloved by the Dutch in the Golden Age. From a view of Delft, Vermeer gives us the world.

As a new Vermeer exhibition opens at the Rijksmuseum, the largest of its kind in history, Vermeer's Hat offers a fascinating perspective on how the burgeoning forces of trade and commerce shaped Vermeer's masterpieces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Release date: Jul 9, 2010
• ISBN: 9781847652546

Timothy Brook

Timothy Brook is a professor and writer on Chinese and world history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A native of Toronto and graduate of the University of Toronto, Brook moved from Toronto to become principal of St. John’s College at UBC in 2004, where he was named to the Republic of China Chair. Brook previously held positions at the University of Alberta, Stanford University, and the University of Oxford, where he was Shaw Professor of Chinese from 2007 to 2009. He is the author of several books, including Vermeer's Hat and Confusions of Pleasure.

Reviews for Vermeer's Hat

[heggiep · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Brook guides us through studies of numerous, mostly Vermeer, paintings and objets d'art; and from each one chooses what he calls a 'door' to help us understand the rapidly globalizing world of the seventeenth century. A clever, imaginative, and thought-provoking book.

[dotobu89 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Each chapter of this book takes a commodity that is in a Vermeer painting and describes the circumstances of how came to be there. This is an economic history of trade in the early seventeenth century that takes the reader on a journey from the silver mines of Potosi to the porcelain factories of China and the tobacco plantations of Virginia. A fascinating story of an early phase in globalisation.

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good microhistorical study using Vermeer's paintings (and a couple other pieces of artwork) to explore the connections between Europe and Asia (mostly China). There are a few moments where it gets too far afield and the attempted connections are too tenuous, but it was an engaging read.

[jkdavies · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Entertaining and interesting, primarily about the Dutch as top trading nation in the 17th century, and details of trade in The East (China, Japan, Philipines) as well as the West - the New World's silver and beaver skins.
Not so much about Vermeer, but I was warned of this before I read the boook so it wasn't read under false expectations...

[jcbrunner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Timothy Brook uses Vermeer's paintings as a starting point to explain the growing global trade in the 17th century. While Vermeer painted only Dutch people, mostly from the city of Delft itself, he shows products from around the world, from America, Africa and Asia - only Australia was still missing in the European perception. Beaver hats from Canada, porcelain/china from China, tobacco and silver from South and Central America, spices from South East Asia. Brook has written an entertaining tour of the world with Vermeer as his prompter. As Vermeer did not depict any foreigners, Brook's scheme of using Vermeer as a guide breaks down when he talks about the first exotic foreign visitors. They were still to rare a sight to make their way to Delft and into a portrait by Vermeer.A promising read that is even better executed in the author's follow-up book about Mr Selden's Map of China that covers a lot of the same ground and shares some of the protagonists.

[eyejaybee · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An intriguing slant on history, Timothy Brook tells of how he first became acquainted with the works of Vermeer as a teenager touring around Holland. He selects five of the artist's paintings, along with three other works by Vermeer's contemporaries, and looks at various items depicted therein. He investigates these items more closely to show how, though they may seem commonplace, they also betoken the extraordinary trade and commercial networks that had already been formed around the world by the mid-seventeenth century. On the way he throws in potted histories of the European colonisation of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the development of trade between Europe and Japan and China.Occasionally rather contrived, on balance this proved an engaging book

[limelite_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the manner of James Burke’s "Connections" for PBS, Brook tells the fascinating story of European contact and establishing commercial trade partnerships with people and cultures from Asia to Canada. Highly readable history of the Dutch East India Company, European politics, and the mutual exchange of influence and impact between Europeans and the world beyond.This is the way one should learn history.Author is professor of Chinese history at Oxford University and has written 6 vol. "History of China" that I’d like to get hold of.

[thecriticaltimes · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

If you're looking for a book detailing the influence of commercial trade in China around the mid 17th century then you've found a gem. If you're looking for a book about Vermeer's paintings then I suggest you pick something else. We're treated to a wonderful depiction of life in the 17th century and the book sets a new standard by which textbooks for high school should be judged. The author uses one important principle to make the book come alive: history is not about places, facts and events. It's about people.It's sad then to see nothing of Vermeer's personality and those of the inhabitants of Delft in this book. In fact by the end of the book the reader has gained a much better insight into the nature and lifestyle of the Chinese during this period. Considering that the author is an expert on Chinese history, this is not surprising. The author is definitely not an author on Dutch history. For example the name kraakporcelein, as anyone in the Netherlands would be able to guess, comes from the verb 'kraken' (to break) and not from the not even remotely similarly sounding name for the Portugese ships called Carracks. If the word has to be derived from another word then it makes more sense that it came from the word for giant monster octopus: the Kraken. That word from the Old Norse noun kraka means "to drag under the water", which is what apparently happened a lot with porcelein during the 17th century. We learn from reading the book Vermeer's Hat. Irony perhaps?Similarly the author reliably convinces the reader that the common currency in the Netherlands around the time of Vermeer was the guilder, even though everyone in Holland knows that up until the middle of the 17th century the currency was called the Florijn or in English the Florin, from the Italian influence of Florence. Vermeer was very much active when this changeover occurs but nowhere in the book is this mentioned. The usage of Florijn was so strong and prevalent that just before the changeover to Euros the Dutch symbol for currency was and had been: 'fl'.It is difficult to evaluate this book, or perhaps novel, because the narrative technique is superb for a history book, but the contents is confusing. One chapter even clearly mentions that that section has no connection with any of Vermeer's paintings. What then is the point? It has to be said that there is a good deal of information in the book regarding Vermeer's work, although by now I'm highly doubtful about it's accuracy. Still, it is a wonderful book to read and it definitely portrays an immersive painting of life in the 17th century in China.

[briandarvell_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I went into this book expecting something quite different than what I found. Not in a bad way mind you but still not what I had originally purchased the book for.This nonfiction book really has very little to actually do with Vermeer at all. The premise is that the author takes items that exist in some artwork that was created during the 17th-century and then muses upon what historical importance those items show during that time frame. A neat concept but I wasn't fully impressed since there was a huge leaning towards Chinese history. Not surprising I guess since the author himself is an expert in Chinese history.For the historical insightfulness I thought the book interesting but I was still a little turned off by the sneaky front the book presents regarding Vermeer and artwork in general.

[janeajones · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Who knew that Vermeer had revealed the wide world of seafaring global trade and incipient imperialism that led to the modern world in his paintings of domestic life in 17th-century Delft? In Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Global World, Timothy Brook reveals how the small changes in daily life, brought about by what he calls the "second encounters," were harbingers of momentous change.Brook, who holds the Shaw Chair in Chinese Studies at Oxford University, brings his wide erudition to illuminating the 17th Century. But Vermeer's Hat is a book not only for scholars, but for curious intelligent readers, whom the author woos with fascinating stories and journeys around the world. The 15th and 16th Centuries were the Age of Exploration in which Europeans discovered the New World and had their first meaningful encounters with the civilizations of the Orient. In the 17th Century, those encounters led to global trade, dreams of empire, new ways of thought, and disruptions of populations.Using a half-dozen of Vermeer's paintings as touchstones, Brook illustrates how the wider world made its way into daily European life. In OFFICER AND LAUGHING GIRL, the enormous hat worn by the Cavalier is made of felt from the beaver skins that the French sent back from their trade with the Hurons in Canada. YOUNG WOMAN READING A LETTER evokes the masses of young men who shipped with the Dutch East Indies Company to make their fortunes by sending back such goods as the Oriental rug draping the table and the Chinese porcelain dish spilling fruit. WOMAN HOLDING A BALANCE is weighing a piece of silver gleaned from the rivers of silver that flowed from the silver mines in Potosi, Peru, not only back to Europe, but through Acapulco and Manila to China.Vermeer's Hat is a fascinating, highly readable history of a period in which the world changed