Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World
Ebook
Ebooks are designed for reading and have few connections to your library.
Overview
In this critical darling Vermeer's captivating and enigmatic paintings become windows that reveal how daily life and thought-from Delft to Beijing--were transformed in the 17th century, when the world first became global.
A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another canvas, fruit spills from a blue-and-white porcelain bowl. Familiar images that captivate us with their beauty--but as Timothy Brook shows us, these intimate pictures actually give us a remarkable view of an expanding world. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur from North America, and it was beaver pelts from America that financed the voyages of explorers seeking routes to China-prized for the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time, including Vermeer's. In this dazzling history, Timothy Brook uses Vermeer's works, and other contemporary images from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to trace the rapidly growing web of global trade, and the explosive, transforming, and sometimes destructive changes it wrought in the age when globalization really began.
In the hands of an award-winning historian, Vermeer's dazzling paintings become windows that reveal how daily life and thought-from Delft to Beijing-were transformed in the seventeenth century, when the world first became global.
NEW WAY OF SEEING VERMEER: Vermeer continues to fascinate readers, witness the success of the book and film Girl with a Pearl Earring. This book offers a new way of seeing Vermeer's pictures.
NEW ANGLE ON GLOBALIZATION: Globalization is the theme of cultural life in our time. Brook shows the impact of this phenomenon as early as the 17th century.
FOR BOTH ART AND HISTORY BUFFS: The book uses art to understand history, and vice versa, in a way that will appeal to audiences of both.
"Brook utilizes the props in Vermeer's tableaux as starting points to journey into the cultural and economic world of the time: A teacup pours forth the history of the porcelain trade with China, while a felt hat is traced to beaver trapping in North America. It's a fascinating approach to cultural history, providing new ways of thinking about the origins of commonplace objects."-Entertainment Weekly, A grade, EW Pick
"Marvelous....The tidbits are fascinating in their own right, but Brook has a larger point, relevant to our own time: We need to narrate the past in a way that recognizes connections, not just divisions."-Bookpage
Thanks to Brook's roving and insatiably curious gaze, Vermeer's small scenes widen onto the broad panorama of world history ... The result is like one of Vermeer's trademark reflective pearls that magically reveals a world beyond itself. A more entertaining guide to world history - and to Vermeer - is difficult to imagine.
From the epicenter of Delft, Brook takes his readers on a journey that encompasses Chinese porcelain and beaver pelts, global temperatures and firearms, shipwrecked sailors and their companions, silver mines and Manila galleons. It is a book full of surprising pleasures.
Elegant and quietly important.... Brook does more than merely sketch the beginnings of globalization and highlight the forces that brought our modern world into being; rather, he offers a timely reminder of humanity's interdependence."
[An] elegant and quietly important book
Brook utilizes the props in Vermeer's tableaux as starting points to journey into the cultural and economic world of the time: A teacup pours forth the history of the porcelain trade with China, while a felt hat is traced to beaver trapping in North America. It's a fascinating approach to cultural history, providing new ways of thinking about the origins of commonplace objects.
- Title: Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World
- Author: Timothy Brook
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
- Print Publication Date: 2010
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 288
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781596917279, 9781596915992, 1596915994, 159691727X
- Resource ID: LLS:9781596917279
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:19:40Z
Timothy Brook is a professor of history and principal of St. John's College at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of many books, including Vermeer's Hat, winner of the Mark Lynton Prize for outstanding achievement in world history, and Confusions of Pleasure, which received the Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.