Vermeer's Hat

Brook turns his attention to Officer and Laughing Girl, believed to have been painted by Vermeer in 1658. The larger-than-life soldier is painted in a way that creates visual distortion, a technique that Vermeer often used. As is common in Vermeer’s interior paintings, the window is depicted at an angle that obscures the view of the outside. Despite this, light streams in; the items in the room provide all the detail one needs to infer information about the world beyond.

Brook focuses on one individual detail in Officer and Laughing Girl: the officer’s wide, fashionable, beaver hat. To contextualize this piece of clothing, Brook begins at Crown Point on Lake Champlain, which lies in North America, bordering New York State and Vermont in the US, and Quebec Province in Canada. In 1609, French navigator and cartographer Samuel Champlain was tasked with establishing trading alliances with Indigenous North Americans to increase the flow of goods from inland. As such, he was part of a larger movement that brought French explorers into North American territory.

The five main Indigenous nations in the area at the time—the Montagnais, the Iroquois, the Huron, the Mohawk, and the Algonquin tribes—were often at war and forming alliances. To reach the St. Lawrence River, occupied by the Mohawk people, Champlain made a treaty with the Algonquin nation. The diplomacy involved was delicate: The French were already using the Montagnais tribe as middlemen, so Champlain had to be careful not to disrupt this alliance while bypassing it so that the French could have access to interior fur trading without go-betweens. Champlain’s Algonquin treaty introduced him to other tribes, whom he provided with men and ammunition in conflicts with their common enemy, the Mohawk people.

During his diplomatic activities, Champlain noted Indigenous practices, such as the use of dreams and sweat lodges to ascertain the outcome of battle. He also recorded what he thought of as a brutal rite: the sacrificing of an enemy via torture and death.

The allied Indigenous groups and the French defeated the Mohawk fighters decisively, particularly because of a technological advantage—the precursor to the gun called the arquebus. Brook briefly explains the history of the arquebus in Europe and China. The arquebus changed the face of war: Spain’s conquest of South America and the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592 showed that larger armies could be overtaken by opponents with superior weapons. Mohawk arrows were no match for Champlain’s streamlined version of the once-clumsy long gun; the Mohawk warriors, shocked and frightened of the killing power of the arquebuses, eventually retreated after many were killed and taken prisoner.

Though Champlain’s victory secured trade routes further in the interior than the French had previously controlled, Champlain had another motive for traveling. He was also tasked with finding a route to China, which all European nations were attempting to access in the centuries after the publication of Marco Polo’s diaries where he described that nation’s splendors. At the time of Champlain’s battle, there were only two known routes to China, both treacherous: around Africa and South America. Champlain’s hoped that the St. Lawrence River would offer a route through Canada—without success.

Champlain’s efforts to find China took a large toll on the Indigenous population. The Huron people, for instance, underwent waves of disease, including smallpox, which decimated their numbers and left them vulnerable to their Iroquois enemies. In 1649, Huron survivors retreated to an island to make a last stand against Iroquois invaders, to no avail. The graves of the children who died from starvation are unmarked and remain on the island to this day.

The next painting that Brook turns to is Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, which features the same window and table from Officer and Laughing Girl. It also depicts the same model, who Brook believes is Vermeer’s wife, Catharina Bolnes. In this painting, the window is fully open and light shines in. Brook suggests that the woman is perhaps reading a letter from a lover conducting business abroad, based on items in the room, such as the Turkish rug that lies on the table and the Chinese porcelain dish of spilled fruit. This imported ceramic object was at first impossible for all but the rich to obtain; its presence highlights just how important Chinese porcelain was to Europe.

When porcelain first reached Europe, people were astonished at its delicacy and quality. Though there were many types of porcelain ware, the blue-and-white style particularly intrigued Europeans. The desire to show off possession of this porcelain helped to establish the still-life genre in painting.

The Portuguese and Spanish had a monopoly on porcelain trade. The Portuguese accessed it through their colony in Goa (part of modern-day India), from where they could navigate directly to the south of China to negotiate with wholesalers. Because safe navigation routes were vital for building commercial wealth, Portuguese and Spanish interests guarded their routes fiercely and aggressively; ships of other nations often banded together for protection from Portugal’s large armed transport ships known as carracks.

In June 1613, English and Dutch ships at Church Bay, Bermuda, decided to take two of these Portuguese vessels by surprise. In the ensuing battle, White Lion, a Dutch ship, sank. When the White Lion was excavated in 1976, a large cargo of broken Chinese porcelain was found, though the ship’s manifest listed no such cargo, indicating that it may have been taken as a prize from another ship.

Earlier instances of stolen cargo gave the Dutch their first glimpses of the beautiful blue-and-white porcelain: In 1602, the Dutch seized the Portuguese ship San Iago, and in 1603, the Santa Catarina, famed due to the amount of porcelain the raid procured.

These sea battles were indicative of the ongoing enmity between the Netherlands and Spain—and their Portuguese allies. Spain had occupied Dutch territory—a bitter occupation that ended with a truce in 1609. Moreover, a papal bull (a fiat issued by the Pope) and the Treaty of Tordesillas, ratified in 1493, gave Spain and Portugal a monopoly on all newly discovered regions. This allowed the Portuguese to establish a trade post in Macao, China.

To break up the Iberian monopoly, which was hard to defend as Portugal and Spain could not occupy every island in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Netherlands wrested the Spice Islands (the Maluku Islands in modern-day Indonesia) from Portuguese control in 1605. Four years later, they established a trading post at Bantam on the island of Java. Their continued harrying of Spanish and Portuguese ships led other European powers to accuse the Dutch of piracy. Their defense of their actions became the first stride toward establishing international law: Dutch lawyer and philosopher Hugo Grotius argued that the Spanish naval blockade of the Netherlands was effectively an act of war, so to retaliate, Dutch ships were free to seize Spanish vessels as spoils; later Grotius famously declared freedom of trade as a principle of international law, an axiom that still stands to this day.

Even after the Dutch had a foothold in China, porcelain remained expensive—though tastes diverged. The Dutch prized carrack porcelain, which the Chinese aristocracy considered inferior. Also popular in Europe were porcelain klapmuts—soup bowls with wide rims. These bowls did not work with Chinese broth soups, they were perfect for European-style stews.

Chinese porcelain was both expensive and extremely in fashion, so a prosperous imitation market sprang up, with Delft tilemakers and artists leading the charge. This imitation porcelain became popular in its own right, becoming known as “Delft” much like imported porcelain was called “china.”

Brook examines the implications of the porcelain trade for China and Europe. The Chinese system of value meant little demand for European products, which lacked markers of age, significant place, or historical associations. As such, China and other Asian countries excluded themselves from growing global interconnectedness. In contrast, Europeans valued imported objects for their beauty and their symbolic implication that challenges in trade and communication were being overcome. The world was being drawn closer together by technology, travel, and science.