Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  But I start my story in Delft rather than Shanghai for a particular reason: the extraordinary portfolio of paintings of Delft by Johannes Vermeer. Dong Qichang left no such portfolio of paintings of Shanghai, from which he fled as soon as he could afford to move to the prefectural capital. Vermeer stayed home, and painted what he saw. When we run our eyes over his canvases, we seem to enter a lived world of real people surrounded by the things that gave them a sense of home. The enigmatic figures in his paintings carry secrets we will never know, for it is their world and not ours. Yet he paints them in a way that seems to give us the sensation we have entered an intimate space. It is all “seems,” though. Vermeer had such control of painting technique that he could fool the eye into believing that the canvas was a mere window through which the viewer can look straight into the places he paints as though they were real. The French call such deception in painting trompe l’oeil, fool the eye. In Vermeer’s case, the places were real, but perhaps not quite in the way he painted them. Vermeer was not a photographer, after all. He was an illusionist drawing us into his world, the world of a bourgeois family living in Delft in the middle of the seventeenth century. Even if Delft didn’t quite look like this, though, the facsimile is close enough for us to enter that world and think about what we find.

  We will linger over five Vermeer paintings in this book, plus two by fellow Delft artists Hendrik van der Burch and Leonaert Bramer, a painting on a delftware plate, looking for signs of Delft life. I have chosen these eight paintings not just for what they show, but for the hints of broader historical forces that lurk in their details. As we hunt for these details, we will discover hidden links to subjects that aren’t quite stated and places that aren’t really shown. The connections these details betray are only implied, but they are there.

  If they are hard to see, it is because these connections were new. The seventeenth century was not so much an era of first contacts as an age of second contacts, when sites of first encounter were turning into places of repeated meeting. People were now regularly arriving from elsewhere and departing for elsewhere, and as they went, carried things with them—which meant that things were ending up in places other than where they were made, and were being seen in these new locations for the first time. Soon enough, though, commerce took over. Moving things were no longer accidental travelers but commodities produced for circulation and sale, and Holland was one such place where these new commodities converged. In Amsterdam, the focal point of their convergence, they caught the attention of the French philosopher René Descartes. In 1631, Descartes was in the midst of a long exile in the Netherlands, his controversial ideas having driven him from Catholic France. He described Amsterdam that year as “an inventory of the possible.” “What place on earth,” he asked, “could one choose where all the commodities and all the curiosities one could wish for were as easy to find as in this city?” Amsterdam was a particularly good place to find “all the commodities and all the curiosities one could wish for,” for reasons that will become clear as we proceed. Such objects came to Delft in lesser numbers, but still they came. A few even ended up in the household that Vermeer shared with his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, to judge from the inventory of possessions that his wife, Catharina Bolnes, drew up in the course of filing for bankruptcy after he died. Vermeer was not wealthy enough to own many nice things, but those he did acquire reveal something about his place in the world. And where we will see them in action is in his paintings.

  To bring to life the stories I want to tell in this book, I will ask that we examine paintings; or more exactly, objects in paintings. This method requires suspending some of the habits we have acquired when it comes to looking at pictures. Chief among these habits is a tendency to regard paintings as windows opening directly onto another time and place. It is a beguiling illusion to think that Vermeer’s paintings are images directly taken from life in seventeenth-century Delft. Paintings are not “taken,” like photographs; they are “made,” carefully and deliberately, and not to show an objective reality so much as to present a particular scenario. This attitude affects how we look at things in paintings. When we think of paintings as windows, we treat the objects in them as two-dimensional details showing either that the past was different from what we know today, or that it is the same, again as though a photograph had been taken. We see a seventeenth-century goblet and think: That is what a seventeenth-century goblet looks like, and isn’t it remarkably like/unlike (choose one) goblets today? We tend not to think: What is a goblet doing there? Who made it? Where did it come from? Why did the artist choose to include it instead of something else, a teacup, say, or a glass jar?

  As we gaze at each of the eight paintings on which this book has been draped, I want us to ask just these sorts of questions. We can still enjoy the pleasures of the surface, but I also want us to duck past the surface and look hard at the objects as signs of the time and place in which the painting was made. Such signs slipped into the picture as it was being painted largely unawares. Our task is to coax them out, so that we can in effect use the painting to tell not just its own story, but our own. Art critic James Elkins has argued that paintings are puzzles that we feel compelled to solve in order to ease our perplexities about the world in which we find ourselves, as well as our uncertainties as to just how it is that we found ourselves here. I have recruited these eight Dutch paintings for such service.

  If we think of the objects in them not as props behind windows but as doors to open, then we will find ourselves in passageways leading to discoveries about the seventeenth-century world that the paintings on their own don’t acknowledge, and of which the artist himself was probably unaware. Behind these doors run unexpected corridors and sly byways linking our confusing present—to a degree we could not have guessed, and in ways that will surprise us—to a past that was far from simple. And if there is one theme curving through seventeenth-century Delft’s complex past that every object we examine in these paintings will show, it is that Delft was not alone. It existed within a world that extended outward to the entire globe.

  LET US BEGIN WITH View of Delft (see plate 1). This painting is unusual in the Vermeer oeuvre. Most Vermeers are staged in interior rooms engagingly decorated with discrete objects from the artist’s family life. View of Delft is quite different. One of just two surviving outdoor scenes, it is his only attempt to represent a large space. Objects, even people, dwindle in scale and significance when set against the wide panorama of buildings and the vast sky above. The painting is anything but a generic landscape, however. It is a specific view of Delft as it appears from a vantage point just outside the south side of the town looking north across the Kolk, Delft’s river harbor. Across the triangular surface of the water in the foreground stand the Schiedam and Rotterdam gates, which flank the mouth of the Oude Delft where it opens into the Kolk. Beyond the gates is the town itself. Our attention is drawn to the sunlit steeple of the New Church. The steeple is visibly empty of bells, and as it is known that the bells started to be mounted in May 1660, we can date the painting to just before that moment. There are other towers on the skyline. Moving leftward, we see the cupola atop the Schiedam Gate, then the smaller conical tower of the Parrot Brewery (Delft had been a center of beer making in the sixteenth century). And poking just into view beside that we see the top of the steeple of the Old Church. This is Delft in the spring of 1660.

  I encountered the painting for the first time on a visit to the Mauritshuis thirty-five years after I landed in Delft. I went expecting to see Girl with a Pearl Earring and I did. I knew that there were other Vermeers on display as well, though I did not know which ones until I turned into the corner room on the top floor and found myself facing his View of Delft. The painting was larger than I expected, busier and far more complex in its modulation of light and shade than reproductions revealed. As I was trying to decipher the buildings in the painting based on what I knew from seventeenth-century maps, it dawned on me that Delft was ten minutes away by tr
ain. Why not compare Vermeer’s rendition with real life, especially if the seventeenth century were still as present as I suspected? I rushed downstairs to the gift shop, bought a postcard of the painting, and hurried to the station. The train pulled out four minutes later, and in no time I was back in Delft.

  I was able to walk right to the spot where Vermeer composed the picture, though the knoll of the small park that now stands in the foreground wasn’t quite high enough for me to set the scene exactly according to his perspective. He must have painted it from a second-story window. Still, only a small adjustment was needed to transcribe the painting onto Delft as it looks today. The vicissitudes of time and city planning have decayed much of the original scene. The Schiedam and Rotterdam gates are gone, as is the Parrot Brewery. The city wall has been replaced by a busy road. But the spires of both the New Church and the Old Church continue to stand in the very places where Vermeer put them. It wasn’t Delft in 1660, but it was close enough for the picturesque scene in View of Delft to tell me where I was. Looking at the painting now, the first door opens easily. This is Delft as it looked from the south. Is there a second door? Yes; in fact there are several.

  The first place we will look for a second door is in the harbor. The Kolk handled boats traveling to and from Delft on the Schie Canal, which ran southward to Schiedam and Rotterdam on the Rhine. Tied up at the quay in the foreground to the left is a passenger barge. Built long and narrow in order to pass easily through canal locks, horse-drawn barges like this operated on fixed schedules and linked Delft to cities and towns throughout southern Holland. Several people have gathered on the quay near the barge. Their dress and demeanor suggest that they will take their places among the eight first-class passengers who paid to sit in the cabin at the back of the barge, rather than jostle in among the twenty-five second-class passengers in the front. A hint of breeze ruffles the water, but otherwise nothing is moving. On the other two sides of the harbor, all the boats are tethered or out of commission. The only suggestions of restlessness are the jagged skyline of buildings and the shadow cast by the huge cumulus cloud hanging at the top of the painting. But the overall effect is one of perfect tranquility on a lovely day. There are other boats tethered around the Kolk: small cargo transports tied up beneath the Schiedam Gate, and another four passenger barges tethered beside the Rotterdam Gate. The two I want to draw our attention to, however, are the wide-bottomed vessels moored to each other at the right-hand side of the painting. This stretch of the quay in front of the Rotterdam Gate was the site of the Delft shipyard. The back masts of these two vessels are missing, and their front masts partially struck, which indicates that they are there for refitting or repair. These are herring buses, three-masted vessels built to fish for herring in the North Sea. Here is another door to the seventeenth-century world, but it requires some explaining to open.

  If there is one overwhelming condition that shaped the history of the seventeenth century more than any other, it is global cooling. During the century and a half between 1550 and 1700, temperatures fell all over the world, not continuously or consistently, but they fell everywhere. In Northern Europe, the first really cold winter of what has come to be called the Little Ice Age was the winter of 1564–65. In January 1565, the great painter of the common people of the Low Countries, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, did his first winter landscape showing hunters in the snow and people playing on the ice. Bruegel may have thought he was painting an anomaly that would not return, but it did. He painted several more winter scenes in the following years, starting the fashion for winterscapes. Vermeer never painted skating scenes, but we know he went out in them, as he bought an iceboat rigged with a sail from a Delft sail maker in 1660, for which he agreed to pay the considerable sum of eighty guilders. His timing was not great, for the canals of Holland failed to freeze for the next two winters. Then the cold returned. Temperatures elsewhere declined too. In China, heavy frosts between 1654 and 1676 killed orange and mandarin groves that had been producing fruit for centuries. The world would not always be this cold, but this was the condition under which life was lived in the seventeenth century.

  Cold winters meant more than ice sailing. They meant shorter growing seasons and wetter soil, rising grain prices, and increasing sickness. A fall in spring temperature of just half a degree centigrade delays planting by ten days, and a similar fall in the autumn cuts another ten days off the harvest. In temperate climates, this could be disastrous. According to one theory, cold weather could induce another evil consequence, plague. All over the world in the century from the 1570s to the 1660s, plague stalked densely populated societies. Plague struck Amsterdam at least ten times between 1597 and 1664, on the last occasion killing over twenty-four thousand people. Southern Europe was hit even harder. In one outbreak in 1576–77, Venice lost fifty thousand people (28 percent of its population). A second great epidemic in 1630–31 killed another forty-six thousand (a proportionately higher 33 percent of the then-diminished population). In China, a harsh run of cold weather in the late 1630s was followed by a particularly virulent epidemic in 1642. The disease raced down the Grand Canal with shocking speed, annihilating whole communities and leaving the country vulnerable first to peasant rebels, who captured Beijing in 1644, and then to the armies of the Manchus, who founded a dynasty (the Qing) and ruled China for the next three centuries.

  Cold and plague dented the rate at which the world’s population was growing, but in retrospect it looks now as though humankind was only preparing for the leap that started around 1700 and still keeps us in midair. Humankind had already broken the limit of half a billion before the seventeenth century began. We were well past six hundred million by the time it ended. Johannes Vermeer and Catharina Bolnes made their little contribution to world population growth, though it was not easy. They buried at least four of their children, three of them in the family grave in the Old Church. There is no record of what they died of, though one suspects plague would have been mentioned, had that been the cause of death. But losses in the family were outweighed by gains, for another eleven children survived to adulthood. Five or six had already been born by the time Vermeer bought the iceboat; perhaps he bought it for their pleasure as well as his own. In the long term, though, only four of his children married and had children. In many families, if not Vermeer’s, those who failed to marry were propelled out of their home communities in search of employment and survival. The young men became the sailors who manned the ships, the employees and bondsmen who staffed the wharves and warehouses handling the new global trade, and the soldiers who filled the armies and protected the trade. The same young men also supplied the crews of the pirate ships that preyed on the growing maritime traffic. The young women became maids and prostitutes.

  In View of Delft, the herring buses are a sign of this history. One benefit that the Dutch gained from global cooling was the southward movement of fish stocks in the North Sea. Colder winters meant that Arctic ice moved farther south, causing major freeze-ups along the coast of Norway, where the herring fishery had traditionally been based. The fishery moved south toward the Baltic Sea, and there it came under the control of Dutch fishermen. This is why we see herring buses moored outside Delft. One of the founding scholars of climate history has even proposed that the prosperity the Dutch enjoyed in the first half of the seventeenth century—the very prosperity that Vermeer captures in his domestic interiors—occurred because of this resource windfall. The herring catch gave the Dutch a stake they could then invest in other ventures, especially in shipping and maritime trade. Those two herring boats are Vermeer’s evidence of climate change.

  View of Delft has another door we can open onto the seventeenth century. Look again at the steeple of the Old Church next to the Parrot Brewery tower, and we see a long roof that runs in an unbroken line to the left side of the canvas. (Had Vermeer continued the painting a little farther to the left, he would have had to include the great windmill at the corner of the city wall that pumped water out of the
canal, which would have altered the structure of the painting.) Earlier commentators have accused Vermeer of simplifying the skyline in order not to detract from other elements in the painting. When I went to stand on the far side of the Kolk, I looked for that roofline. The roofs I saw were not composed in quite the way Vermeer painted them, but despite the architectural adding and subtracting that has gone on since 1660, I could see what he was painting: the roof of a large warehouse complex stretching the entire block from the Oude Delft to the moat on the city’s west side. It was the warehouse of the Oost-Indisch Huis, East India House, as I was able to determine by walking up the Oude Delft and checking the house fronts. This was the home of the Delft Chamber of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie), the center of a vast web of international trade connecting Delft to Asia.

  The Dutch East India Company—the VOC, as it is known—is to corporate capitalism what Benjamin Franklin’s kite is to electronics: the beginning of something momentous that could not have been predicted at the time. The world’s first large joint-stock company, the VOC was formed in 1602 when the Dutch Republic obliged the many trading companies popping up to take advantage of the Asian trade boom to merge into a single commercial organization. The stick was monopoly. Commercial ventures that did not join the VOC would not be allowed to trade in Asia. The carrot was unlimited profits in which the state would not interfere, other than to expect a modest tax dividend. The merchants grudgingly went along with the arrangement, and the VOC emerged as a federation of six regional chambers: the Amsterdam Chamber, which contributed half the capital, the Hoorn and Enkhuizen chambers in north Holland, Middelburg in the Rhine estuary (Zeeland) in the south, and Rotterdam and Delft in the heart of Holland. What at first sight looked like an unworkable compromise—separate chambers controlled their own capital and operations while adhering to uniform guidelines and policies—turned out to be a brilliant innovation. Only a unique federal state such as the Dutch Republic could have dreamed up a federal company structure. The VOC combined flexibility with strength, giving the Dutch a huge advantage in the competition to dominate maritime trade to Asia.