Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  On Yuyuan garden in Shanghai, see Gazetteer of Songjiang Prefecture [Songjiang fuzhi], (1630), 46.59b.

  “Paintings as puzzles” is taken from James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (New York: Routledge, 1999).

  View of Delft is presented in Epco Runia and Peter van der Ploeg, In the Mauritshuis: Vermeer (Zwolle: Waanders, 2005), pp. 42–59; their discussion of boat types on pp. 48–49 is particularly instructive. For a bird’s-eye view of the Oost-Indisch Huis on a seventeenth-century map, see H. L. Loutzager et al., De Kaart Figuratief van Delft [A Pictorial Map of Delft] (Rijswijk: Elmar, 1997), pp. 177,197.

  On Delft’s connections to the wider world, see Kees van der Wiel, “Delft in the Golden Age: Wealth and Poverty in the Age of Johannes Vermeer,” in Dutch Society in the Age of Vermeer, ed. Donald Haks and Marie Christine van der Sman (The Hague: Haags Historisch Museum, 1996), pp. 52–54.

  On the Little Ice Age, the shift in the herring fishery, Pieter Bruegel’s winter scenes, and the frost killing of orange trees in China, see H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 218–23,227–30. Data on canal freezing in the Netherlands, compiled by Jan de Vries, appear in H. H. Lamb, Climatic History and the Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 476, n. 1.

  On the plague, see William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Doubleday, 1976). Plague episodes in Amsterdam (after 1578) are noted in N.W. Posthumus, Inquiry into the History of Prices in Holland (Leiden: Brill, 1946), vol. 1, p. 641. For Venice, see Carlo Cipolla, Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), p. 100.

  The estimates of the numbers of Dutch leaving the Netherlands come from Jaap Bruijn, Femme Gaastra, and I. Schöffer, Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 143–44. Vermeer’s cousins being in the Far East is noted in Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, p. 312.

  The quote from Francis Bacon is featured in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), p. 19. On the effect of guns on the changes of the seventeenth century, see Jack Goody, Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), pp. 77–78.

  On transculturation, see Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940; repr. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 98, 103.

  European influence on late Ming art has been suggested by James Cahill, The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 82–86; and Richard Barnhart, “Dong Qichang and Western Learning—a Hypothesis,” Archives of Asian Art 50 (1997–98), pp. 7–16. On possible Chinese influences on Vermeer, see Bailey, Vermeer, p. 177.

  Pearls in Vermeer’s paintings are examined in Runia and van der Ploeg, In the Mauritshuis: Vermeer, pp. 66–67. On Chinese taste in pearls, see Gu Yanwu, Advantages and Disadvantages of the Various Regions of the Realm [Tianxia junguo libing shu] (1662) (Kyoto: Chbun shuppansha, 1975), 29.126a; see also Sung Ying-hsing, Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century, trans. E-tu Zen Sun and Shiouchuan Sun (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966), p. 296.

  Song Yingxing’s comments come from his preface to Sung Ying-hsing, Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century, p. xi. The epitaph to Willem Schouten appears in Willem Ysbrantsz Bontekoe, Memorable Description of the East Indian Voyage, 1618–25, trans. Mrs. C. B. Bodde-Hodgkinson and Pieter Geyl (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1929), p. 157. The Chinese comment of 1609 is quoted in my Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China, p. 153.

  CHAPTER 2. VERMEER’S HAT

  On the officer’s hat, see Wheelock, Vermeer and the Art of Painting, p. 58. On Vermeer’s use of maps, see James Welu, “Vermeer: His Cartography,” The Art Bulletin 57:4 (Dec. 1975), pp. 529–47; Evangelos Livieratos and Alexandra Koussoulakou, “Vermeer’s Maps: A New Digital Look in an Old Master’s Mirror,” e-Perimetron 1:2 (Spring 2006), pp. 138–54. For an early look at the Balthasar/van Bercken-rode family of cartographers, see Edward Lynam, “Floris Balthasar, Dutch Map-Maker and His Sons,” Geographical Journal 67:2 (Feb.1926), pp. 148–161.

  The primary source for the battle is Samuel Champlain’s own account, first published in 1613 and again, with slight alterations, in 1632. The first appears in bilingual text in The Works of Samuel de Champlain, ed. H. P. Biggar (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1922), vol. 2, pp. 65–107; the second is in vol. 4, pp. 80–105. With the exception of the opening passage, which can be found on pp. 97–99 of vol. 4, all direct quotes from Champlain in this chapter are taken from vol. 2, with minor alterations to remove euphemisms. The 1609 conflict is fully described in Bruce Trigger, The Children of Aataensic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976), ch. 4. For more recent scholarship on Champlain, see Champlain: The Birth of French America, ed. Raymonde Litalien and Denis Vaugeois, trans. Käthe Ross (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004). As I was finishing this book, I was pleased to discover that Christian Morissonneau in “Champlain’s Dream” in that volume came independently to the same conclusion regarding China’s place in Champlain’s calculations.

  For Olive Dickason’s view of 1609 as a decisive moment in Native-white history, see her Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992), p. 122. For a view skeptical of its significance, see W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1780 (rev. ed., Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), p. 25.

  On the Champlain and Huron wampum belts, see Tehanetorens, “Wampum Belts” (Onchiota: Six Nations Indian Museum, 1972; Ohsweken, Ont.: Iroqrafts, 1993), pp. 11, 59.

  For Indian words and names, I generally follow the usages in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, ed. Bruce Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), vol. 1. Etymologies of tribal names have been taken from John Steckley, Beyond Their Years: Five Native Women’s Stories (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1999), pp. 15–16, 63, 243–45.

  On the history of the arquebus, see Carl Russell, Guns on the Early Frontiers: A History of Firearms from Colonial Times Through the Years of the Western Fur Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), pp. 1–18. The early history of guns in Japan is treated in Noel Perrin, Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543–1879 (Boston: David Godine, 1979), pp. 5–31. The demand for Dutch firearms is noted in C. R. Boxer, Jan Compagnie in Japan, 1600–1850 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), p. 26.

  On torture in Native culture, see Georg Friederici, Gabriel Nadeau, and Nathaniel Knowles, Scalping and Torture: Warfare Practices Among North American Indians (Ohsweken, Ont.: Iroqrafts, 1985). Georges Sioui’s observation is from his For an Amerindian Autohistory: An Essay on the Foundations of a Social Ethic (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), p. 52.

  On the history of beaver hats, see Hilda Amphlett, Hats: A History of Fashion in Headgear (1974), pp. 106–109; Bernard Allaire, Pelleteries, manchons et chapeaux de castor: les fourrures nord-américaines à Paris [The Fur Trade, Muffs and Bearer Hats: North American Furs in Paris] (Québec: Septentrion, 1999). On the fur trade, see Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956); Paul Phillips, The Fur Trade (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961); Raymond Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade, 1550 –1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943).

  The destruction of natural habitat in fifteenth-century Europe is noted in David Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe After the Year 1000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 153–55.

  Queen Elizabeth’s letter to the emperor of China is mentioned in Morissonneau, “Champlain’s Dream,” p. 260.

/>   On Champlain’s quest for saltwater in 1603, see Works of Samuel de Champlain, vol. 1, pp. 156–62.

  Champlain’s maps are examined in Conrad Heidenreich and Edward Dahl, “Samuel de Champlain’s Cartography,” in Champlain: The Birth of French America, pp. 312–32; see also Christian Morissonneau, “Champlain’s Place-Names,” op. cit., pp. 218–29.

  The standard account of the travels of Jean Nicollet (also spelled Nicolet) as having paddled to Green Bay is repeated in my Confusions of Pleasure, p. xv. I now accept the correction that Nicollet went to Lake Nipigon rather than Green Bay, as proposed by Gaétan Gervais in his “Champlain and Ontario (1603–35),” in Champlain: The Birth of French America, p. 189. For early maps that name Green Bay as Baye des Puans, see Derek Hayes, Historical Atlas of the United States (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2006), pp. 38, 41, 90, 92, 94.

  A post-contact epidemic among the Winnebagoes is mentioned by Wilcomb Washburn in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 1, pt. 2, p.409.

  For “glorious Vests, wrought & embroidered on cloth of Gold,” see John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford: Claendon, 1955), vol. 2, pp. 460–61, writing of what he saw in 1664.

  De la Franchise’s poetic dedication to Champlain’s On Savages of 1603 appears in Works of Samuel de Champlain, vol. 1, p. 86.

  CHAPTER 3. A DISH OF FRUIT

  Most of the information about the White Lion is taken from the excavation report of the Groupe de Recherche Archéologique Sous-Marine Post-Médiévale, The Ceramic Load of the ‘Witte Leeuw’ (1613), ed. C. L. van der Pijl-Ketel (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1982). The price of pepper is from Posthumus, Inquiry into the History of Prices in Holland, vol. 1, p. 174. Information about the voyages of VOC ships comes from Bruijn, et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, vol. 1, pp. 74, 86, 89, 91, 188, 192; vol. 2, pp. 12,18, 22, 26; and vol. 3, pp. 8, 12–13, 16–17. A complete catalog of VOC ships is available online at www.vocsite.nl/schepen.

  The Portuguese carracks are listed in A. R. Disney, Twilight of the Pepper Empire: Portuguese Trade in Southwest India in the Early Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 172. Van der Pijl-Keter identifies the Nossa Senhora do Monte da Carmo as the Nossa Senhora de Conceição.

  Information on Dutch maritime trade has been taken from C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire: 1600 –1800 (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. 22–25; Kristof Glamann, Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 1620–1740 (1958; rev. ed., Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), pp. 16–20, 57–59, 112–18, 134, 153; Els Jacobs, In Pursuit of Pepper and Tea: The Story of the Dutch East India Company (Amsterdam: Netherlands Maritime Museum, 1991), pp. 11–12, 51–53, 73–74, 84–95; Dietmar Rothermund, Asian Trade and European Expansion in the Age of Mercantilism (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981), especially pp. 27–30; and Niels Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 101–113. The close to 3 percent growth rate in Dutch imports is given in Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, “After Columbus: Explaining Europe’s Overseas Trade Boom, 1500–1600,” Journal of Economic History 62:2 ( June 2002), p. 419. The Wapen van Delft voyages are noted in A. J. H. Latham and Heita Kawakatsu, eds., Japanese Industrialization and the Asian Economy (New York: Routledge, 1994), app. 2.1. The effects of this trade are explored in Violet Barbour, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the 17th Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), pp. 35–41; and Om Prakash, “Restrictive Trading Regimes: VOC and the Asian Spice Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” in Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c. 1400 –1750, ed. Roderick Ptak and Dietmar Rothermund (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991), pp. 107–126.

  The Red Lion in Japan in 1609 is mentioned in Boxer, Jan Compagnie in Japan, p. 27. For the two ships named China, see Bruijn et al., Dutch Asiatic Shipping, vol. 2, pp. 22–23,196.

  On the history of Dutch porcelain imports, see T. Volker, Porcelain and the Dutch East India Company, 1602–1682 (Leiden: Brill, 1954); Maura Rinaldi, Kraak Porcelain: A Moment in the History of Trade (London: Bamboo, 1989); Christian J. A. Jörg, “Chinese Porcelain for the Dutch in the Seventeenth Century: Trading Networks and Private Enterprise,” in The Porcelains of Jingdezhen, ed. Rosemary Scott (London: Percival Foundation of Chinese Art, 1993), pp. 183–205; and John Carswell, Blue & White: Chinese Porcelain Around the World (London: British Museum Press, 2000). On Sino-Persian interaction in porcelain design, see Lisa Golombek, “Rhapsody in Blue-and-White,” Rotunda 36:1 (Summer/Fall 2003), pp. 22–23.

  The development of porcelain production in Europe is described in Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 103–5.

  Grotius’s quotations are taken from The Freedom of the Seas, trans. Ralph Van Deman Magoffin (Toronto: H. Milford, 1916), pp. 12–13; see also Hamilton Vreeland, Hugo Grotius, the Father of the Modern Science of International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1917), pp. 47–58.

  The 1608 porcelain order is mentioned in Volker, Porcelain and the Dutch East India Company, p. 23. The Portuguese commissioning of export porcelain is treated in Rui Guedes, Companhia das Índias: porcelanas [Company of the Indies: Porcelains] (Lisbon: Bertrand, 1995). For the cargo of the Nassau, see “Cargo van twee Oost-Indische Shepen” [Cargo of Two East India (Company) Ships] (Amsterdam: Gerrit Jansz, 1640), on display at Amsterdam’s Maritime Museum.

  Wen Zhenheng’s comments in this chapter are taken from his A Treatise on Superfluous Things, Annotated [Zhangwu lun jiaozhu], ed. Chen Zhi (Nanjing: Jiangsu kexue jishu chubanshe, 1984), pp. 97 (preference for earlier Ming porcelain), 260 (brush pots), 317 (ideal characteristics), 352 (use of vases), and 419 (Potter Cui). The logic of the book is explored in Clunas, Superfluous Things; see in particular his comments on foreign objects on pp. 58–60,85. The Beijing guidebook comment comes from Liu Tong, Sights of the Imperial Capital [Dijing jingwu lüe] (Beijing: Beijing guji chubanshe, 1980), p. 163. Reports of kraak porcelain in Chinese tombs appeared in the journal Cultural Objects [Wen wu], 1982, no. 8, pp. 16–28, and 1993, no. 2, pp. 77–82; my thanks to Craig Clunas for pointing out these references.

  For a seventeenth-century comment on the European taste for gold and silver dishes, see Pascale Girard, ed., Le Voyage en Chine d’Adriano de las Cortes S. J. (1625) (Paris: Chandeigne, 2001), p. 253.

  Descartes’s comment of 1631 is quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World (London: Collins, 1984), p. 30. For Evelyn’s comment on Paris in 1644, see Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 2, p. 100.

  Pieter Isaacsz’s 1599 painting, The Corporalship of Captain G. Jasz. Valckenier and Lieutenant P. Jacobsz Bas, is cited, among others, in A. I. Spriggs, “Oriental Porcelain in Western Paintings, 1450–1700,” Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society vol. 36 (London: 1965).

  For a quick sketch of the history of Delft tiles, see Bailey, Vermeer, pp. 173–77; the quote appears on p. 175. The Amsterdam satirist on Chinese art is mentioned in Edwin Van Kley, “Qing Dynasty China in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Literature, 1644–1760” in The History of the Relations Between the Low Countries and China in the Qing Era (1644–1911), ed. W. F. Vande Walk and Nöel Golvers (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), p. 230. On the use of abandoned Delft breweries as potteries, see Richard Unger, A History of Brewing in Holland: Economy, Technology and the State (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 324.

  Li Rihua’s discussion with Merchant Xia appears in his Diary from the Water-Tasting Studio [Weishui xuan riji] (Shanghai: Yuandong chubanshe, 1996), p. 84.

  Lam’s exploits in 1617–18 were noted by the English factor in Hirado, Richard Cocks; see William Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York: Dutton, 1959), p. 352.

  CHAPTER 4. GEOGRAPHY LESSONS

  Las Cortes’s account of the shipwreck of 1625 has been published in French by Pascale Girard as Le Voyage en Chine. I have drawn particularly from pp. 37–55, 65–69, 85–87, 97, 106–9, 354–57.

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sp; On the concept of “Moor” in the seventeenth century, see Allison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 33–36; Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 12.

  The Chinese description of Spaniards in Macao is from Yin Guangren and Zhang Rulin, A Brief Account of Macao [Aomen jilüe] (1751; 1800), 2.8b. Li Rihua’s description of luting appears in his Diary from the Water-Tasting Studio, p. 103; for his description of Red Hairs, see p. 43. Wang Shixing’s account of blacks in Macao comes from his Continuation of My Record of Extensive Travels [Guangzhi yi] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), p. 101. The price of oxen (four taels a head) is noted in C. R. Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan Trade (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1959), p. 184.