Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century And The Dawn Of The Global World

About this book

In one painting a military officer in a Dutch sitting room flirts with a laughing girl. In another a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. Vermeers paintings haunt us with their beauty and mysterywhat stories lay behind these stunningly rendered moments? As Timothy Brook shows us these pictures which seem so intimate actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding world. The dashing officers hat is of beaver fur from Canada while the pieces of silver mined in Peru might be used to purchase the Chinese porcelain seen in other Vermeer paintings. Moving outward from Vermeers studio Brook traces the web of trade that was spreading across the globe in the seventeenth century. The wharves of Holland wrote a French visitor were an inventory of the possible. Vermeers Hat shows just how rich this inventory was and how the urge to acquire such things was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood.