Vermeer's Hat: The seventeenth century and the dawn of the global world

Description

In one painting, a Dutch military officer leans toward a laughing girl. In another, a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. In a third, fruit spills from a porcelain bowl onto a Turkish carpet. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur, which European explorers got from Native Americans in exchange for weapons. Beaver pelts, in turn, financed the voyages of sailors seeking new routes to China. There - with silver mined in Peru - Europeans would purchase, by the thousands, the porcelain so often shown in Dutch paintings of the time. Vermeer's haunting images hint at the stories behind these exquisitely rendered moments. As Timothy Brook shows us in Vermeer's Hat, these pictures, which seem so intimate, actually open doors onto a rapidly expanding world.

Timothy Brook holds the Shaw Chair in Chinese Studies at Oxford University. He is the author of many books, including the awkward-winning Confusions of Pleasure.

Spell-binding ... as a guide to the world behind the pictures Vermeer's Hat is mind-expanding -- John Carey * Sunday Times * A brilliant attempt to make us understand the reach and breadth of the first global age -- Kathryn Hughes * Guardian * Brook takes you into the paintings in a way that can be spookily intimate -- William Leith * Evening Standard * Brook is a gifted storyteller... spellbinding... a treasure trove of astonishing pleasures * The Lady * How brilliantly Brook connects all with all * Guardian * Revelatory * Sunday Business Post * Illuminating footnotes to Vermeer's miracles on canvas * Independent * An erudite, surprising book that finds traces of swashbuckling where you'd least expect -- Thomas Marks * Daily Telegraph * Truly mesmerising. In this accessible but authoritative study, he... shows better than anyone I've read so far, the truly subversive power of detail -- Lesley McDowell * Independent on Sunday *