Vermeer's Hat Analysis

Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World delivers an interesting view of the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer’s paintings and how they open a door into the world during the seventeenth century. Painted to convey the everyday lives of his subjects, Vermeer’s canvases reveal merchant families in their homes engaging in very average actions like reading letters or talking to one another. Adversely, the author Timothy Brook uses the art Vermeer created to portray the beginning of trade around the world during the seventeenth century. In these paintings are objects that Brook depicts with social economic features such as carpets, porcelain, silver coins, and maps which he elaborates on their origins and how these simple objects were useful during the era illustrated. These objects, according to Brook, played a key role in the growing exchange of commerce between Europeans and

On top of the carpet is a, Chinese porcelain dish. The silver coins depicted in Vermeer’s painting from Europeans had a better currency in China than in Europe which, from the painting, the woman is weighing her silver on a balance. The blue and white porcelain, for instance, is used as an example of a good that had became available to almost everyone as it was such in high demand from the Chinese, “The lure of China's wealth haunted the seventeenth-century world.” This quote indicates that China had influence on the spread of globalization during the seventeenth century as China was very wealthy and powerful. “Champlain needed to keep fur prices high in Paris so that they could pay for the costs of getting to China,” Brooks emphasizes that the Chinese porcelain transformed the world in places like the Netherlands in the same way tobacco changed China as it had an impact of the age of