Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  2

  VERMEER’S HAT

  VERMEER MUST HAVE owned several hats. No document mentions this, but no Dutchman of his generation and status went out in public bareheaded. Take a look at the people in the foreground of View of Delft, and you will see that everyone, male and female, has a hat or head covering. A poor man made do with wearing a slouch cap known as a klapmuts, but the better sort flaunted the kind of hat we see in Officer and Laughing Girl (see plate 2). We should not be surprised to see the officer wearing his lavish creation indoors. When Vermeer painted a man without a hat, he was someone at work: a music teacher or a scientist. A courting man did not go hatless. The custom for men to remove their hats when entering a building or greeting a woman (a custom generally forgotten today) was not yet being observed. The only person before whom a European gentleman bared his head was his monarch, but as Dutchmen prided themselves in bowing to no monarch and scorned those who did, their hats stayed on. Vermeer himself wears hats in the two scenes into which he painted himself. In his cameo appearance as a musician in The Procuress, he wears an extravagant beret that slouches almost to his shoulder. In The Art of Painting ten years later, he wears a much smaller black beret, even then the distinguishing badge of the artist.

  Vermeer had other social roles to play, and so needed other costumes in which to play them. He enjoyed the gentlemanly prestige of being a “marksman” in the Delft militia, though there is no evidence he knew how to use a firearm. A pike, breastplate, and iron helmet appear in the inventory of his possessions that wife Catharina Bolnes drew up after his death as a deposition in her application for bankruptcy, but there is no gun, and no military costume. To judge from the many portraits from the period showing Dutch gentlemen in such costume, he would have needed a grand felt hat of just the sort the soldier in Officer and Laughing Girl is wearing. A beret would have been considered flippant, and an iron helmet was uncomfortable to wear and only donned for combat. Being a militiaman involved a certain social distinction that one had to maintain by dressing properly, so Vermeer must have owned a hat like the one we see in Officer and Laughing Girl.

  What we don’t know is whether he owned that particular hat. There is no sign of one in the posthumous inventory, but as hats of this sort were expensive and Catharina was desperately short of cash, she might well have sold it in the two and a half months between his death and her filing for bankruptcy protection. What we do know is that there was a hatter in the family. Dirck van der Minne, the uncle who had a son and two grandsons in the East Indies when his will was read in 1657, was a felt maker and hatter. Perhaps Uncle Dirck made hats for Vermeer. Perhaps we are looking at one of them in Officer and Laughing Girl.

  The hat will be the door inside this painting that we will open, but let us briefly consider the painting itself. What do we see? An exuberantly dressed officer in scarlet tunic, larger than life (the effect of a trick of visual distortion that Vermeer liked to play), wooing a beautiful young woman (my guess is that we are looking at Catharina). The content of the scene might seem highly individual, but it belongs firmly to the era in which Vermeer painted it, for it presents an almost generic account of the new rules governing how young men and women in polite Dutch society courted in the late 1650s.

  A few decades earlier, officers did not have the opportunity to sit bantering like this with women of higher station. Custom did not tolerate private meetings between wooer and wooed. During Vermeer’s lifetime, the rules of courtship shifted, at least in urban Holland. Civility pushed aside military prowess as the way to win a woman. Romance took over from cash-in-hand as the currency of love, and the home became the new theater for acting out the tension between the genders. Men and women still negotiated over sex and companionship—this is exactly what the officer and the laughing girl are doing—but the negotiation was now disguised as banter, not barter, and its object was marriage and a solid brick house with leaded window panes and expensive furnishings, not an hour in bed.

  As the new emblems of bourgeois life crowded out cash, and politesse replaced rowdiness, the interactions of men and women became more restrained, more subtle and refined. And so the artists who painted scenes of flirtation no longer set them within lively brothels, as they did earlier in the seventeenth century, but within domestic interiors. Vermeer lived at the cusp of this shift in gender relations, and of the painterly conventions that went along with them. Officer and Laughing Girl shows him working out the consequences of this shift.

  Soldiers who fought in the long Dutch war of independence against Spain might once have claimed women as the spoils of war, but that age was finished. This may be why Vermeer has hung The New and Accurate Topography of All Holland and West Friesland on the back wall of the room behind the conversing couple. The map originated from a piece of commissioned propaganda celebrating the Dutch struggle for independence prior to the truce of 1609, but that war was now well in the past.1 Officers no longer had the same battlefield role to play and could not claim quite the same authority and respect. This reversal in the prestige of soldiering may be what Vermeer is alluding to by reversing the color scheme on the map, making the land blue and the water brown. Land and sea have traded places; so too soldiers and civilians face each other in a different social order. So too, perhaps, men and women have changed roles, for despite the swagger of the officer in the picture, it is he who implores and she who controls the terms of the bargain of marriage that they might make. These reversals were part of the larger transition that Dutch society was undergoing in Vermeer’s time: from military to civil society, from monarchy to republicanism, from Catholicism to Calvinism, merchant house to corporation, empire to nation, war to trade.

  The door we go to in this painting is not the map, however, but the hat, for on the other side of that door lies the passageway that leads out into the wider world. At the end of the passageway we find ourselves at a place now known as Crown Point on Lake Champlain on the morning of 30 July 1609.

  “THEY GAZED AT ME AND I at them,” Samuel Champlain wrote, recalling the moment when he stepped forward from the ranks of his Native allies with an arquebus in his hands. Champlain was the leader of a French mission on the St. Lawrence River seeking to probe the Great Lakes region for a northwest passage to the Pacific. Arrayed against him were dozens of Mohawk warriors in wooden armor.

  Three chiefs stood at the front. They froze at the sight of him, then began to advance. As soon as they raised their bows, Champlain wrote, “I levelled my arquebus and aimed straight at one of the three chiefs.” The wooden slats of their armor were poor protection from gunfire. “With this shot two fell to the ground and one of their companions was wounded, who died of it a little later.”

  There had been four lead balls in the chamber of Champlain’s arquebus. At a distance of thirty meters there was no guarantee that even one would find its mark, but somehow three of them did. When the three Mohawk chiefs fell, two of them dead on the spot, the warriors behind them froze in shock. A shout of jubilation went up behind Champlain. His allies’ cry was “so loud that one could not have heard it thunder.” Champlain needed this confusion, as it took a full minute to reload an arquebus, during which time he was exposed to return fire from the other side. Before the attackers had time to recover, one of the two French arquebusiers Champlain had sent into the woods fired at their flank through the trees. The shot, reports Champlain, “astonished them again. Seeing their chiefs dead, they lost courage and took to flight, abandoning the field and their fort, and fleeing into the depth of the forest.”

  Samuel Champlain firing at Mohawk warriors on the shore of Lake Champlain, 1609. From Samuel Champlain, Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain.

  Champlain’s Native allies joined in the assault. A volley of arrows streaked over his head, striking some of the enemy archers and giving him the cover he needed to reload. He fired again into the backs of the retreating Mohawks, killing several more. The battle was over barely minutes after it had begun. Champlain’s allies
scalped the dozen dead Mohawks for tokens of victory they could take back to their villages, where they would be greeted by the women swimming out to the canoes and hanging the scalps around their necks. They captured another dozen Mohawks to take north as replacements for the young males whose ranks the intertribal war was constantly thinning on both sides. Some of Champlain’s allies had been hit, but none fatally. The contest had been lopsided—death and defeat on one side, a few arrow wounds on the other—and the victory complete.

  What happened that morning was a turning point—Métis historian Olive Dickason has declared it to be the turning point—in the history of the European-Native relationship: the beginning of the long, slow destruction of a culture and a way of life from which neither side has yet recovered. How did all this come about?

  Samuel Champlain was part of the first wave of incursions by Europeans into the North American continent. He made his initial journey up the St. Lawrence River into the Great Lakes system—a region he called Canada—in 1603 as a member of a French expedition to establish trading alliances. The most important person he met on that voyage was Anadabijou, chief of a tribe the French called the Montagnais.2 Five thousand Montagnais lived at that time along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River around Tadoussac, where the Saguenay River flows into the St. Lawrence. The Saguenay was an important trade route even before the French arrived on the scene, but their manufactured goods, especially ironwares, increased the flow of furs and copper, which came from as far north as Hudson Bay. Holding Tadoussac enabled Anadabijou and the Montagnais to prosper. It also made them a target of attack from other tribes anxious to control that trade, notably the Mohawks. Anadabijou greeted Champlain with pomp and feasting; he needed an alliance with the French as much as they needed one with him.

  Champlain understood that without the support of the Montagnais, the French could not survive a single winter, let alone insinuate their way into existing trading networks. At the same time, however, Champlain realized that allowing Anadabijou to control his access to trade reduced his profits. He had to leapfrog over the Montagnais and expand his contacts farther up the St. Lawrence River to move closer to beaver country. That is why he went on the warpath on Lake Champlain in 1609. He needed allies in the interior to guide him farther up country, and the surest way to secure them was to go with them to war. Trade would pay for the costs of his exploration, but war would earn him the trust on which trade depended. The Montagnais were the first of the “nations,” as Champlain called them, with whom he built a ladder of alliances over his next thirty years—though by 1608 he was ready to sidestep Anadabijou and relocate the French base farther upriver to the narrows at Québec. But he still traded with the Montagnais and was careful to honor them by traveling exclusively in their canoes when he went upriver to Lake Champlain the following year.

  That summer in Québec, Champlain forged an alliance with the son of Iroquet, an Algonquin chief.3 Iroquet was keen to improve his access to European trade goods. He also wanted an alliance, for the Algonquins were even more exposed to the summer raiding of the Mohawks than the Montagnais. Champlain pledged to his son that he would return in June the following year to join Iroquet’s band of warriors in a raid on the Mohawks. With the Algonquins and Montagnais came members of a third nation, the Hurons.4 The four tribes making up the Huron Confederacy lived in some two dozen large settlements across the woodlands north of Lake Ontario, the first of the Great Lakes. They spoke an Iroquoian rather than an Algonkian dialect, but were allied to the Algonquins, not the Iroquois south of Lake Ontario. Champlain had not yet managed to penetrate Huron territory, but he was already known to them. Ochasteguin, one of the Huron tribal chiefs, was allied with Iroquet and used him to gain an introduction to Champlain in 1609. Like Iroquet, Ochasteguin wanted to trade, but he also wanted an ally in his ongoing war with the Iroquois Confederacy.

  The Mohawks were the easternmost of five nations that had formed the Iroquois Confederacy in the sixteenth century and controlled the entire woodland region south of Lake Ontario. The Mohawks were known as the eastern gate of the Iroquois and were charged with protecting them on that flank—which exposed them to the arriving Europeans before any of their confederates. They were eager to gain access to European trade goods, especially axes, and raided annually into the St. Lawrence Valley to acquire them. Champlain called the Mohawks the “bad Irocois,” by way of contrasting them with the Hurons, whom he termed the “good Irocois” (the Hurons spoke an Iroquoian dialect).5 The Mohawk threat induced the Hurons, Algonquins, and Montagnais to revitalize an alliance among themselves to deal with this threat. They were initially unsure how staunch their French allies would be, and suspected that, being traders, they might have no great enthusiasm for going to war. Iroquet and Ochasteguin both confided to Champlain that a rumor had been circulating during the hard winter of 1608 that the French were traders who had no interest in fighting.

  TRADE ROUTES IN THE GREAT LAKES REGION

  Champlain challenged the rumor, assuring them it was untrue. “I have no other intention than to make war; for we have with us only arms and not merchandise for barter,” he declared at their first meeting. “My only desire is to perform what I have promised you.” He even returned the challenge. “Had I known what evil reports would be made to you, I should have held those making such reports far greater enemies than your own enemies.” Iroquet and Ochasteguin graciously replied that they had never believed the rumor, indeed had not even listened to it. Everyone knew they were talking about the Montagnais, who were not happy to be losing their privileged access to French goods, but they shared a larger goal: attacking the Mohawks. The multinational alliance set off on 20 June.

  After part of the group split off to take their wives and trade goods back to Huronia, the war party consisted of twenty-four canoes, each with three men. The French had brought along their own shallop, a two-masted riverboat that could seat ten rowers plus a man at the tiller. The French traveled in the shallop, though Champlain preferred to join the Montagnais in their canoes. That shallop soon became a problem. The party had to paddle up the Richelieu River toward Lake Champlain, but there were rapids to ascend. The French boat was too heavy to go up the rapids and too awkward to portage. In the memoirs he wrote for public consumption (and to gain financial support for his venture) in France, Champlain writes that he complained to the chiefs that “they had told us the contrary of what I had seen at the rapids, that is to say, that it was impossible to pass them with the shallop.” The chiefs expressed their sympathy for Champlain’s distress and promised to make up for it by showing him other “fine things.” Ochasteguin and Iroquet had not been so ungracious as to tell him directly that bringing the shallop was a bad idea. Better that he learn by his own experience rather than confront him and create ill feelings.

  As the party went forward, scouts were sent ahead to look for signs of the enemy. Each evening as the light fell, the scouts returned to the main party and the entire camp went to sleep. No one was put on watch. This laxity provoked Champlain, and he made plain his frustrations with his Native allies.

  “You should have men posted to listen and see whether they might perceive anything,” he told them, “and not live like bestes as you are doing.” Bestes, the old French spelling for bêtes, or “beasts,” might be better translated as “silly creatures,” or worse, “dumb animals.” A certain level of mutual linguistic incomprehension probably insulated both sides from each other’s verbal barbs. In any case, the problem between them was not just language. A sensible precaution from Champlain’s point of view was, from a Native point of view, nothing of the sort.

  “We cannot stay awake,” one of them patiently explained to this exasperated European. “We work enough during the day when hunting.”

  The French military perspective could not grasp the logic at work in this situation: that one did only what one had to do, not what one did not have to do. It was folly not to post guards when warriors from the Iroquois Confederac
y were close, but it was worse folly to waste precious energy posting them when the enemy was not within striking distance. Champlain imagined warfare in other ways. He could not grasp that Natives organized warfare carefully, but differently from Europeans.

  When they came within a day’s journey of Lake Champlain, the war party had to decide whether to forge ahead or turn back. By then the Native warriors were devoting much attention to looking for signs not just of whether Iroquois were in the vicinity, but of whether luck would be with them on this venture. Telling and listening to each other’s dreams was a means to detect the future, yet no one had had a decisive dream. It was time to consult the shaman.

  The shaman set up his spirit-possession wigwam that evening to divine the wisest course. Having arranged his hut to his satisfaction, he took off his robe and laid it over the structure, entered it naked, and then went into a trance, sweating and convulsing so violently that the wigwam shook with the force of his possession. The warriors crouched in a circle around the enchanted wigwam, listening to his stream of unintelligible words that seemed be a conversation between the shaman’s own clear voice and the croak of the spirit with whom he was speaking. They also watched for signs of spirit fire that might appear in the air above the wigwam.

  The result of the divination was positive. The war party should proceed. That decision made, the chiefs gathered the warriors and laid out the order of battle. They placed sticks on a cleared piece of ground, one for each warrior, to show every man what position he should take when the time for battle came. The men then walked through these formations several times so that they could see how the plan worked and would know what to do when they met the enemy. Champlain liked the planning but not the divination. The shaman he called a “wizard,” a “scoundrel,” a “scamp” who faked the entire production. Those who attended the ceremony got the same contemptuous treatment. Champlain pictured them as “sitting on their buttocks like monkeys” and watching the divination with rapt attention. He calls them “poor people” who were being deceived and defrauded by “these gentlemen.” As he confides to his French readers, “I often pointed out to them that what they did was pure folly and that they ought not to believe in such things.” His allies must have thought him spiritually stunted for his failure to grasp the need for access to higher knowledge.