Our eyes go first to the young woman, but the dish would have competed for the attention of Vermeer’s contemporaries. Dishes like this were a delight to behold, but they were still uncommon and expensive enough that not everyone could buy one. Go back a decade or two and Chinese dishes rarely make appearances in Dutch paintings—but go forward a decade or two and they are everywhere. The decade of the 1650s is just the moment when Chinese porcelains were taking their place in Dutch art as in Dutch life. In fact, these dishes became part of the emergence of a newly popular painting genre, still lifes, which seventeenth-century Dutch artists turned into an art form. The artist selected objects of a similar type (fruit) or plausibly sharing in a common theme (decay, the sign of vanity) and arranged them on a table in a visually pleasing way. A large Chinese dish was just the sort of thing that could serve to unify smaller objects, like fruits, and jumble them together in a dynamic heap. The challenge of the still life was to make the scene so real that it would fool the eye into believing that this was not a picture—and the clever artist might paint a fly into the scene, as though the fly too had been fooled. Creating trompe l’oeil reality was just the challenge that Vermeer played with throughout his painter’s life.
The dish of fruit on the table in front of Catharina is there to delight the eye, but Vermeer is using the still life of tumbled fruit to convey the tumble of emotions in her mind as she reads the letter from her lover far away—perhaps as far away as the Dutch East Indies—and struggles to control her thoughts. Her posture and manner suggest a person of calm, but even she cannot hold her thoughts steady. So too the fruit topples out of the dish before her. It is all arranging and playacting, of course. The lover is fictional, the sheet of paper the model holds may well have no words written on it, and the carpet and dish and curtain have all been artfully positioned. But the world is real, and that is what we are in pursuit of. This dish, appropriately for a picture painted in the town that created delftware, will be the door through which we head out of Vermeer’s studio and down a corridor of trade routes leading from Delft to China.
SIXTEEN DEGREES BELOW THE EQUATOR and two hundred kilometers from the coast of Africa, a volcanic island breaks the surface of an otherwise empty South Atlantic. The British East India Company incorporated St. Helena into the British Empire in the eighteenth century. They built Jamestown at what had been known as Church Bay (now Jamestown Bay) on the leeward side of the island. The island’s main claim to fame lies in being the place to which the British banished Napoleon after defeating him at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815—the closing scene in the long drama that led to Britain’s ascendancy as the leading world power in the nineteenth century.
Before the English occupied St. Helena, the island served as a way station for ships of any nation making the long journey from Asia back to Europe. Lying directly in the path of the southeast trade winds carrying ships northward from the Cape of Good Hope, it was a place of refuge where vessels and crews could recover from the storms and diseases that dogged marine travel; a haven for rest, repair, and the taking on of fresh water before the final leg home. Modern shipping has no need of such islands and now passes St. Helena by, leaving it, in its oceanic remoteness, for none but tourists to visit.
The only ship in Church Bay at midmorning of the first day of June in 1613 was an English ship, a small East India Company vessel called the Pearle. The Pearle had arrived in Church Bay two weeks earlier as part of a convoy of six ships coming back from Asia to London. There was one other English ship in the convoy, the Solomon, but the other four sailed for the Dutch East India Company. Even though the Dutch and the English were often at war in the seventeenth century, the captains on both sides were content to put aside their differences and sail together for protection against their real competitors, the Spanish and Portuguese. The six ships passed two weeks at St. Helena resting and refitting for the final leg of the journey back to Europe. But when the convoy departed at dawn on first of June, they left the Pearle behind. Half the Pearle’s crew of fifty-two had been on the sick list when the ship arrived at St. Helena, and most were as yet too weak to work. The Pearle’s water casks were still being filled and loaded that morning. Captain John Tatton had no choice but to delay departure until the following morning and hope to catch up with the rest of the fleet.
Tatton and his crew were busy preparing the Pearle after the others departed when later that morning two great Portuguese ships came into sight around the southern point of the bay. These were carracks, the great armed transport ships that the Portuguese built to ferry merchandise across the oceans. They had made their maiden voyage to Goa, Portugal’s little colony on the west coast of India, and were on their way back to Lisbon with a great cargo of pepper. Tatton understood that the Pearle was no match for these two great vessels, the largest wooden ships Europeans ever made. The better part of valor was to scurry out of range of their guns, so he hoisted his sails and fled. The hasty exit meant abandoning his water casks and the sick half of his crew on the island. But he was not cutting and running. Tatton had another plan. He went off in hot pursuit of the rest of the Anglo-Dutch convoy, hoping to convince the Dutch admiral, Jan Derickzson Lam, to turn the fleet around and return to capture the two carracks in Church Bay.
The Pearle caught up to Lam’s flagship, the Wapen van Amsterdam, past nightfall. Lam “was very glad and made signs to his Fleet to follow,” Tatton afterward reported. Not all the Dutch ships heeded his order to turn around, however. The Bantam and the Witte Leeuw (White Lion) turned about and came alongside, but the Vlissingen failed to acknowledge the signal, as did the other English ship, the Solomon. Lam was undeterred. Four against two might not be as overpowering as six against two, but his fleet had the advantage of surprise.
After a day and a half of hard tacking against the wind, the Anglo-Dutch quartet arrived back at St. Helena. Lam and Tatton were right to bank on surprise. Jeronymo de Almeida, the admiral of the Portuguese fleet, must have seen the Pearle flee but had then put the English ship out of his mind and made no preparations for its return. Nossa Senhora da Nazaré (Our Lady of Nazareth), his flagship, lay at anchor with its full length exposed to the open ocean. Nossa Senhora do Monte da Carmo (Our Lady of Mount Carmel) was anchored alongside it, effectively boxed in by the bigger vessel.
Lam attacked before the Portuguese could reposition their carracks for a better defense. He launched the Bantam and the White Lion toward the bow and stern of the Nazareth at angles that made it almost impossible for the Portuguese to fire its cannon at them, then sailed the Wapen straight toward it. Tatton later wrote that Lam should have tried to negotiate a Portuguese surrender, but it seems that Lam would settle for nothing less than capture. “Too covetous” was Tatton’s judgment.
The Bantam’s attack on the Nazareth’s bow “much cooled the Portugals courage,” according to Tatton. Then the captain of the White Lion, Roeloff Sijmonz Blom, fired on the stern of the Nazareth, puncturing it above the waterline. Blom brought the White Lion in close enough to cut the carrack’s anchor cables, hoping to force it to drift to shore. The crew of the Carmel, caught powerless behind the Nazareth, was nonetheless able to pass a replacement cable to the other ship and resecure it. Preparing to board the flagship, Blom moved the White Lion alongside the Nazareth and the Carmel. As he did so, his starboard gunners exchanged fire with the Carmel.
Opinions are divided as to what exactly happened next. Some said that the Portuguese scored a direct hit on the White Lion’s powder magazine. Others insisted that a faulty gun on the White Lion’s lower deck exploded. Whatever the cause, the explosion blew off the back end of the ship. The White Lion sank to the bottom in moments. Tatton believed that Blom, his crew of forty-nine, along with two English passengers on board died in the blast or were drowned in the bay, though some in fact were rescued and taken back to Lisbon for repatriation.
Having lost an entire ship along with crew and cargo, Admiral Lam could not afford to gamble anything more. He ordered th
e other ships to withdraw. Tatton was able to take the Pearle in close enough to the shore north of the bay to pick up eleven of his abandoned crew, who had gathered there in the hope of rescue, before retreating. The misfortunes of this voyage would be played out only at the very end. As the Bantam passed through the channel at Texel on its way into the Zuider Zee (now the IJsselmeer), Amsterdam’s inland sea, it went aground and broke apart. It was atrocious luck for Lam. The number of VOC ships that sank in this channel can be counted on the fingers of one hand, but this was one of the fingers. (The Portuguese fleet fared only slightly better. Admiral Almeida was able to get both ships back to Lisbon, but the Carmel had been so badly damaged that it had to be removed from service.)
When the White Lion sank in thirty-three meters of water, a large cargo went with it to the bottom. The ship’s manifest survives in a Dutch archive, from which it is possible to find out exactly what was lost. The manifest lists 15,000 bags of pepper, 1 312 kilograms of cloves, 77 kilograms of nutmeg, plus 1,317 diamonds having a combined weight of 480.5 carats. The manifest was drawn up on the docks at Bantam, the VOC trading port at the westernmost tip of Java. Given the VOC mania for accuracy of detail and thoroughness of accounting, there is no reason to suspect that anything got into the cargo hold that wasn’t first recorded in the company ledgers. This is why the marine archaeologists who went down to excavate the wreck of the White Lion in 1976 were surprised by what they found. They knew that the spices would long ago have rotted and the diamonds been lost in the harbor’s shifting sands. They did not expect to find cargo. They were intent instead on recovering the ship’s metalwork, especially its cannon. And yet there in the mud under the vessel’s shattered hull were strewn thousands of pieces of the very thing that, in 1613, was synonymous with China itself—china.
Could the porcelain have been dropped on top of the wreck by later ships lightening their load while at anchor? It is possible, but there was too much porcelain in one place, and when pieces were brought to the surface, their styles and dates indicated that they were produced during the reign of the Wanli emperor, which came to an end in 1620. All the evidence—other than the ship’s manifest—points to this being cargo from the White Lion. What the explosion destroyed, it paradoxically saved. Had the carefully packed bales of porcelain made it to the docks of Amsterdam as they were supposed to, they would have been sold and resold, chipped and cracked, and finally thrown away. This is the ordinary fate of almost all the porcelain that made it back to the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. There are pieces scattered about the world in museums and private collections, but they survive as individual remnants cut loose from the circumstances that got them to Europe and separated from the shipments of which they were a part. The explosion of the White Lion inadvertently saved this particular shipment from this fate. True, most of the pieces recovered are broken, but ironically enough, more have survived than would have made it through the four centuries between 1613 and the present. They may be damaged, but they are still together (now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam), and that means that they can show us what a shipment of porcelain in the early seventeenth century looked like.
THE FIRST CHINESE PORCELAIN TO reach Europe amazed all who saw or handled it. Europeans could think only of crystal when pressed to describe the stuff. The glazed surfaces were hard and lustrous, the underglaze designs sharply defined, the colors brilliantly vivid. The walls of the finest pieces were so thin that you could see the shadow of your hand on the other side when you lifted a plate or cup to the light.
The style that most caught the attention of Europeans was blue-and-white: thin white porcelain painted with cobalt blue and coated in a perfectly transparent glaze. This style was actually a late development in the history of Chinese ceramics. The potters of Jingdezhen, the kiln city in the inland province of Jiangxi where imperial orders were regularly filled, developed the technology to fire true porcelain only in the fourteenth century. Porcelain production requires driving kiln temperatures up to 1,300 degrees Celsius, high enough to turn the glazing mixture to a glassy transparency and fuse it with the body. Trapped permanently between the two were the blue pictures and patterns that so captured the eye. The closest European approximation was faïence, earthenware fired at a temperature of 900 degrees Celsius and coated with a tin oxide glaze. Faïence has the superficial appearance of porcelain, but lacks its thinness and translucence. Europeans learned the technique from Islamic potters in the fifteenth century, who had developed it to make cheap import substitutes that could compete with Chinese wares. It was not until 1708 that a German alchemist was able to reproduce the technique for making true porcelain in a town outside Dresden called Meissen, which soon was also synonymous with fine porcelain.
European buyers were delighted by the effect of blue on white. Although we think of deep cobalt blue lines and figures on a pure white background as quintessentially Chinese, it is a borrowed, or at least an adapted, aesthetic. At the time Chinese potters began firing true porcelain, China was under Mongol rule. The Mongols also controlled Central Asia, enabling goods to move overland from one end of their continental empire to the other. Persian taste had long favored Chinese ceramics, which had been available there since the eighth century. Unable to match the whiteness of Chinese ceramics, their potters developed a technique of masking their gray clay with an opaque white glaze that looked Chinese. Onto this white base they painted blue decorative figures, using local cobalt for the color. The effect was striking. Once Persia and China were more directly linked by Mongol rule in the thirteenth century, Chinese potters had much better access to the Persian market. Ever sensitive to the demands of that market, they adjusted the look of their products to appeal to Persian taste. Part of this adaptation was to incorporate cobalt decoration into their designs. As Chinese cobalt is paler than Persian, the potters of Jingdezhen began importing Persian cobalt to produce a color they thought would appeal to Persian buyers.
Blue-and-white porcelain emerged from this long process of innovation. It sold well in Persia, in part because of the Koran’s ban on eating from gold or silver plates. The wealthy wanted to be able to serve guests on expensive tableware, and if they were blocked from presenting food on precious metals, they needed something as lovely and as expensive but that wasn’t available in the time of the Koran. Porcelain from Jingdezhen fit the bill. Mongol and Chinese buyers were also charmed by the look of this porcelain. What we recognize as “china” today was born from this chance intercultural crossover of material and aesthetic factors, which transformed ceramic production worldwide. Syrian potters in the court of Tamerlane, for instance, started making their products look Chinese early in the fifteenth century. As the global trade in ceramics expanded in the sixteenth century to Mexico, the Middle East, and Iberia, and to England and the Netherlands in the seventeenth, potters in all of these places followed suit. Everyone tried—though for a long while they also failed—to imitate the look and feel of Chinese blue-and-white. The ceramic stalls of seventeenth-century bazaars outside of China were cluttered with second-rate imitations that fell far short of the real thing.
Dutch readers first learned about Chinese porcelain in 1596 from Jan Huygen van Linschoten, a Dutchman who went to India in Portuguese employ. Van Linschoten’s best-selling Itinerario inspired the coming generation of Dutch world traders. Van Linschoten saw Chinese porcelains in the markets of Goa. Though he never went to China, he managed to pick up reasonably sound information about the commodity. “To tell of the porcelains made there”—he is speaking of China on the basis of what he learned in Goa—“is not to be believed, and those that are exported yearly to India, Portugal and New Spain and elsewhere!” Van Linschoten learned that the porcelain was produced “inland”—as Jingdezhen was—and that only the second-rate stuff was exported. The best pieces, “so exquisite that no crystalline glass is to be compared with them,” were kept at home for the court.
Indian traders had been bringing Chinese porcelain to the subcon
tinent since at least the fifteenth century. They acquired it from Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia, who brought it from ports along the southeast coast of China, to which ceramics dealers had in turn shipped it out from the interior. The development of a maritime trade route around Africa suddenly opened up a market in Europe. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to acquire Chinese porcelain in Goa, though soon enough they would extend their trade routes to south China where they could deal directly with Chinese wholesalers. This was the route that the Dutch wanted to get in on, and soon enough they did. But the first major shipment of Chinese porcelain to Amsterdam was not a Dutch enterprise. It was the result of the Dutch-Portuguese rivalry on the high seas, off St. Helena no less. Eleven years before the sinking of the White Lion, a fleet of Dutch ships seized the Portuguese San Iago there in 1602. The San Iago was captured without difficulty and taken to Amsterdam with all its cargo. Onto the docks of that city emerged the first great trove of china to reach Holland, and buyers from all over Europe fought for a piece. The Dutch called it kraakporselein, “carrack porcelain,” in acknowledgment of the Portuguese carrack from which it had been taken.
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