Vermeer’s Hat

Categories: History , Staff Picks , Nonfiction , Arts & Crafts

Here’s one for all of you art history buffs, lovers of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and even readers of what are now popularly being called microhistories, those fascinating social histories that look at how a single insignificant object or place or event changed or reflected the course of world events.

In Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, Timothy Brook uses the objects glimpsed in Vermeer’s paintings to explore how economy and culture became globalized in the seventeenth century.

The broad-brimmed hat of the dashing officer in Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl becomes an emblem to explore the American fur trade and the search for the fabled Northwest Passage. A porcelain dish of fruit in the foreground of Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window leads to a discussion of the Chinese porcelain trade, and so on.

Brook looks at how a remarkable web of trade connections began to effect "transculturation" on a worldwide scale in the seventeenth century. Though he uses the objects accumulated in Delft, a center of Dutch world trade, he is able to give some interestingly non-European perspective on the whole process, too. (Brooks is a historian who has specialized in Chinese history.)