Timothy Brook - Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World

This paperback edition published in 2009

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3A Exmouth House

Pine Street

London EC1R 0JH

www.profilebooks.com

First published in the United States of America by

Bloomsbury Press, New York

Copyright Timothy Brook, 2008, 2009

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN: 978-1-84765-254-6

For Fay

CONTENTS

MAPS

T HE SUMMER I was twenty, I bought a bicycle in Amsterdam and cycled southwest across the Low Countries on what would be the final leg of a journey that took me from Dubrovnik on the Adriatic to Ben Nevis in Scotland. I was on my second day out, pedaling across the Dutch countryside, when the light began to fade and the late-afternoon drizzle blowing in off the North Sea turned the road under my tires slick. A truck edged me too close to the verge, and my bicycle went over into the mud. I was not hurt, but I was soaked and filthy and had a bent fender to straighten. Without the shelter of a bridge, which was my usual hobos recourse in bad weather, I knocked at the door of the nearest house to ask for a few moments out of the rain. Mrs. Oudshoorn had watched my spill from her front window, which is where I guessed she spent many a long afternoon, so I was not altogether a surprise when she opened her door a crack and peered out at me. She hesitated for a brief moment, then put caution aside and opened the door wide so that this bedraggled young Canadian could come inside.

All I wanted was to stand for a few minutes out of the rain and pull myself together, but she wouldnt hear of it. She poured me a hot bath, cooked me dinner, gave me a bed to sleep in, and pressed on me several of her dead husbands things, including a waterproof coat. The next morning, as sunlight poured over her kitchen table, she fed me the best breakfast I ever had eaten and chuckled slyly about how angry her son would be if he ever found out shed taken in a complete stranger, and a man at that. After breakfast she gave me postcards of local sites to take as mementos and suggested I go see some of them before climbing back on my bicycle and getting back on the road. The sun was shining that Sunday morning, and there was nowhere I had to be, so out I went for a stroll and a look. Her town has stayed with me ever since. Mrs. Oudshoorn gave me more than the hospitality of her home. She gave me Delft.

A most sweet town, with bridges and a river in every street, is how the London diarist Samuel Pepys described Delft when he visited in May 1660. The description perfectly fit the town I saw, for Delft has remained largely as it looked in the seventeenth century. Its cobbled streets and narrow bridges were dappled that morning by galleon-shaped clouds scudding in from the North Sea a dozen kilometers to the northwest, and the sunlight reflecting off the canals lit up the brick faades of the houses. Unlike that far grander canal city, Venice, which Italians built up from the surface of the sea on wooden pilings driven into tidal sandbars, the Dutch built Delft below sea level. Dikes held back the North Sea, and water sluices were dug to drain the coastal fens. This history resides in its name, delven being the Dutch word for digging. The main canal running the length of the western part of the town is still called the Oude Delft, the Old Sluice.

Memories of the seventeenth century are peculiarly present in the two great churches of Delft. On the Great Market Square is Nieuwe Kerk, the New Church, so named because it was founded two centuries after the Oude Kerk, the Old Church on the Oude Delft canal. Both great buildings were built and decorated as Catholic churches, of course (the Old Church in the thirteenth century, the New Church in the fifteenth), though they did not remain so. The light coming through the clear glass in the windows and illuminating their interiors bleaches out that early history in favor of what came later: the purging of Catholic idolatry, including the removal of stained glass in the 1560s, which was part of the Dutch struggle for independence from Spanish rule, and the fashioning of Protestant gathering places of almost civil worship. The floors of both churches belong quite securely to the seventeenth century, for they are covered with inscriptions marking the graves of the wealthier citizens of seventeenth-century Delft. People in those days hoped to be buried as close as possible to a holy place, and better than being buried beside a church was to be interred underneath it. Many of the numerous paintings done of the interiors of these two churches show a lifted paving stone, occasionally even gravediggers at work, while other people (and dogs) go about their business. The churches kept registers of where each family had its grave, but most of the graves bear no written memorial. Only those who could afford the cost had the stones laid over them inscribed with their names and deeds.