33 pages 1 hour read

Timothy Brook

Vermeer's Hat

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2005

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Summary and Study Guide

Overview

Vermeer’s Hat is a thought-provoking narrative by art historian Timothy Brook. The full title of the book, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, indicates the comprehensive outlook Brook seeks to approach in the eight chapters comprising the book. The book’s namesake is Johannes Vermeer, a Dutch painter from Delft, who is known for his use of light and the textual clues that abound in his artwork. Brook uses five of Vermeer’s paintings, as well as artwork from his contemporaries, to make a case for globalization and its beginnings in the seventeenth century. Through Vermeer, Brook highlights how interconnected the seventeenth-century world was, an interconnection that can be glimpsed in Vermeer’s paintings if one looks closely enough.

 

Brook begins his study in Delft, the place of Vermeer’s birth, life, and death. Brook’s own story coincides with Vermeer’s in Delft one day when his bike is damaged while cycling through Delft. From that pivotal moment in Brook’s life, he encounters the world of Vermeer. Though none of Vermeer’s paintings are on display in Delft, Brook uses Delft as the starting point in his investigation of the seventeenth-century world as displayed in Vermeer’s paintings. Brook takes each painting as a puzzle imbued with clues. From these clues, he traces a route that highlights trade, commerce, industry, and nation building in the seventeenth century. The paintings include: Officer and Laughing Girl, View of Delft, Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, The Geographer, and Woman Holding a Balance. Brook also uses The Card Players by Hendrik Van der Burch, and other works, to explore the inner workings of globalization as it made its mark on the seventeenth century.

 

One of the themes Brook addresses is the movement of people from one place to another, whether by force or self-volition. With new contacts, and second contacts, as Brook puts it, people were brought together for purposes of trade and knowledge-seeking. The need for understanding and improvisation soon outshone conflict and discovery. The world, in seeking to understand other parts of itself, became more willing to accept divergent parts of itself. This contact ended in new knowledge and new trade routes for Europeans, enslavement and dispossession for Native peoples and Africans, and pushback and fear for Asian nations, most notably the Chinese. Brook highlights different approaches to trade taken by Europeans and how these approaches differed from those of their Chinese counterparts. Globalization in the seventeenth century reached everywhere and affected most everyone, yet some people resisted the interdependency as much as possible.

 

Other themes researched by Brook include transculturation and sovereignty. With the movement of people and cultural artifacts, transculturation took its place in the world. The most notable example of this in the book deals with tobacco and smoking. Smoking was first glimpsed by Columbus when he viewed indigenous people in North America. Though used for religious and secular practices, when smoking made its way into Europe, and then to China, aspects of the host cultures were transplanted, though the religious origins of smoking often were not. Sovereignty also came into question, especially when dealing with the open seas, trade routes, and the will of the people versus the dictates of monarchs.

 

Brook uses important markers of the seventeenth century, including the rise of silver, tobacco, and slave labor, to highlight the good and bad implications of globalization as it began affecting everything it touched. Ultimately, Brook shows how viewing painters as active participants allows for a better understanding of the world in which the paintings were created, and the world they foreshadow, a connected world with shared humanity and history.