Vermeer's Hat (4 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
THE LOW COUNTRIES, ca. 1650
With second contacts, the dynamic of encounter changes. Interactions become more sustained and likelier to be repeated. The
effects they produce, however, are not simple to predict or understand. At times they induce a thorough transformation of
everyday practices, an effect that Cuban writer Fernando Ortiz has called “transculturation.” At other times they provoke
resistance, violence, and a loss of identity. In the seventeenth century, most second contacts generated effects that fall
between these two extremes: selective adjustment, made through a process of mutual influence. Rather than complete transformation
or deadly conflict, there was negotiation and borrowing; rather than triumph and loss, give and take; rather than the transformation
of cultures, their interaction. It was a time when people had to adjust how they acted and thought in order to negotiate the
cultural differences they encountered, to deflect unanticipated threats and respond cautiously to equally unexpected opportunities.
It was a time not for executing grand designs, but for improvising. The age of discovery was largely over, the age of imperialism
yet to come. The seventeenth century was the age of improvisation.
The changes this impulse toward improvisation evoked were subtle but profound. Consider again Dong Qichang, the artist from
Shanghai to whom I have referred. Dong Qichang’s was the first generation in China to see European prints. Jesuit missionaries
brought some to China to convey their message in visual form and help converts imagine the life of Christ. In Dong’s own painting,
1597 marks a major shift in style that set the foundations for the emergence of modern Chinese art. It has been suggested
that the visual devices in European prints may have impelled him toward this new style. Or take our artist from Delft. Vermeer
was among the first generations of Dutch painters to see Chinese painting, rarely on silk or paper, more commonly on porcelain.
It has been suggested that his use of “Delft blue,” his preference for off-white backgrounds to set off blue materials, his
taste for distorting perspective and enlarging foregrounds (he does both in
View of Delft
), and his willingness to leave backgrounds empty betray a Chinese influence. Given what little we know of Vermeer, and how
well we know it, it is unlikely that evidence will ever come to light that allows this suggestion to be proven or disproven.
It is simply an idea of influence, but something that would have been an impossibility a generation earlier. Hints of intercultural
influence of this sort, so fine as to be almost imperceptible, are just what we should learn to expect as we go back into
the seventeenth century.
Seen in this way, the paintings into which we will look to find signs of the seventeenth century might be considered not just
as doors through which we can step to rediscover the past, but as mirrors reflecting the multiplicity of causes and effects
that have produced the past and the present. Buddhism uses a similar image to describe the interconnectedness of all phenomena.
It is called Indra’s net. When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in that web is tied a pearl.
Everything that exists or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true—every dharma, in
the language of Indian philosophy—is a pearl in Indra’s net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of
the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel in the net. Everything that exists
in Indra’s web implies all else that exists.
Vermeer would have appreciated the metaphor. He loved to put curved surfaces into his paintings and use them to reflect everything
around them. Glass spheres, brass utensils, pearls—like the lenses he probably used to help him paint—were suitable for revealing
realities beyond what was immediately there. In no less than eight of his pictures, Vermeer paints women wearing pearl earrings.
And on these pearls he paints faint shapes and outlines hinting at the contours of the rooms they inhabit. No pearl is more
striking than the one in the
Girl with a Pearl Earring
. On the surface of that large pearl—so large it was probably not a real pearl at all, but a glass teardrop varnished to give
it a pearly sheen—we see reflected her collar, her turban, the window that illuminates her off to the left, and, indistinctly,
the room where she sits.
2
Look closely at one of Vermeer’s pearls, and his ghostly studio floats into view.
This endless reflectivity, writ large, nods toward the greatest discovery that people in the seventeenth century made: that
the world, like this pearl, was a single globe suspended in space. It was their burden to confront the idea of the world as
an unbroken surface on which there is no place that cannot be reached, no place that is not implied by every other place,
no event that belongs to any world but the one they now had to share. It was their burden as well to inhabit a reality imbued
with a permanent restlessness, where people were in constant motion and things might travel half the globe just so that a
buyer here could obtain what a maker there had made. These burdens forced people to think about their lives in fresh and unfamiliar
ways. For some, such as Song Yingxing, the author of China’s first encyclopedia of technology,
Exploitation of the Works of Nature
(1637), this mobility was a sign of living in more open and better times. “Carriages from the far southwest may be seen traversing
the plains of the far northeast,” he enthuses in the preface to his encyclopedia, and “officials and merchants from the south
coast travel about freely on the North China Plain.” In the old days, you “had to resort to the channels of international
trade to obtain a fur hat” from foreign lands, but now you could get one from your haberdasher down the street.
For others, the emerging global mobility did not just redefine their idea of the world, but widened horizons and opened opportunities
that would not have existed a few decades earlier. However much pleasure Song Yingxing gained from knowing that a new and
wider world existed, he was fated to spend his life tucked away in the interior of China as an armchair surveyor of the world—so
far from the ocean that he may never have even seen it, let alone sailed on it. Had the Chinese encyclopedist had the opportunities
of a Dutchman of his generation, however, he might well have been someone like Willem Cornelisz Schouten. Schouten hailed
from the Dutch port of Hoorn, home to many of the first generation of Dutch sea captains. He first circumnavigated the globe
between 1615 and 1617, and then was back in Asian waters with the VOC in the 1620s. Schouten did not survive the long sea
journey home across the Indian Ocean in 1625, however. He died of unrecorded causes just before his ship reached Antongil
Bay on the east coast of Madagascar, and was buried there. An anonymous epitaph in verse epitomizes him as personifying the
spirit of his age.
In this our western world, where he was born and bred,
Brave Schouten could not rest; his inmost soul afire
Urged him to seek
beyond, to voyage and strive ahead.
The poet could have bemoaned brave Schouten’s death as a failure to return home to Hoorn, but he doesn’t. Instead, he celebrates
this sailor’s death as a great success, the culmination of the global life he had chosen to live.
’Tis meet then that he lies i’ the world of his desire,
Safe after all his travels. Oh great and eager mind,
Repose in blessed
peace!
Dying abroad in the seventeenth century was not banishment from home for Schouten, but permanent residence in the world he
desired. The only final end for Schouten, should he ever tire of Madagascar, was not Hoorn but heaven.
. . . Yet if they soul refuse
In narrow Antongil for e’er to stay confined,
Then (as in earthly life so fearless thou didst
choose
The unknown channel ’twixt the seas of East and West,
Outstripping the sun’s course by a whole day and night),
Ascend
thou up, this time surpassing the sun’s height,
And find in heaven with God hope and eternal rest.
The commanding passion of the seventeenth century, on both sides of the globe, was to navigate “the unknown channel ’twixt
the seas of East and West”; to reduce that once unbridgeable distance through travel, contact, and new knowledge; to pawn
one’s place of birth for the world of one’s desire. This was the fire within seventeenth-century souls. Not everyone was thrilled
with the disorder and dislocation that the passions of great and eager minds produced. One Chinese official complained in
1609 that the end result of this whirlwind of change was simply that “the rich become richer and the poor, poorer.” Even Willem
Schouten may have had his doubts about the whole business as he lay in his hammock and drifted into death. But enough people
were drawn into the vortex of movement to believe that they too could outstrip the sun’s course. Their world—and it was fast
becoming our world—would never be the same. No surprise, then, that artists as homebound as Johannes Vermeer were catching
glimpses of the change.
V
ERMEER 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.