Vermeer's Hat

All I wanted was to stand for a few minutes out of the rain and pull myself together, but she wouldn’t 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 husband’s 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 she’d 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.

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.

It was in the Old Church that I came upon one stone inscribed neatly and sparely:
JOHANNES VERMEER
1632–1675. I had stumbled
upon the last remains of an artist whose paintings I had just seen and admired in the Rijksmuseum, the national museum in
Amsterdam, a few days earlier. I knew nothing about Delft or Vermeer’s connection to the town. Yet suddenly there he was in
front of me, awaiting my notice.

Many years later I learned that this paving stone had not been placed over his grave when he died. At that time, Vermeer was
not a person of sufficient importance to deserve an inscribed gravestone. He was just a painter, an artisan in one of the
fine trades. It is true that Vermeer was a headman of the artisans’ guild of St. Luke, and that he enjoyed a position of honor
in the town militia—though that was a distinction he shared with some eighty other men in his neighborhood. Even if there
had been money on hand when he died, which there wasn’t, this status did not justify the honor of an inscription. Only in
the nineteenth century did collectors and curators come to think of Vermeer’s subtle and elusive paintings as the work of
a great artist. The stone there now was not laid until the twentieth century, put down to satisfy the many who, unlike me,
knew he was there and came to pay their respects. This slab does not actually mark the place where Vermeer was buried, though,
since all the paving stones were taken up and relaid when the church was restored following the great fire of 1921. All we
know is that his remains are down there somewhere.

Nothing else of Vermeer’s life in Delft has survived. We know that he grew up in his father’s inn off the Great Market Square,
and that he lived most of his adult life in the house of his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, on the Oude Langendijck, or Old Long
Dike. This was where he surrounded himself with an ever-growing brood of little children downstairs; painted most of his pictures
upstairs; and died suddenly at the age of forty-three, his debts mounting and his wellspring of inspiration gone dry. The
house was pulled down in the nineteenth century. Of Vermeer’s life in Delft, nothing tangible is left.

The only way to step into Vermeer’s world is through his paintings, but neither is this possible in Delft. Of the thirty-five
paintings that still survive (a thirty-sixth, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, is still
missing), not one remains in Delft. They were sold after he died or carted to auctions elsewhere, and now are dispersed among
seventeen different galleries from Manhattan to Berlin. The three closest works are in the Mauritshuis, the royal picture
gallery in The Hague. These paintings are not far from Delft—The Hague was four hours away by river barge in the seventeenth
century but is now only ten minutes by train—but they are no longer where he painted them. To view a Vermeer, you have to
be somewhere other than Delft. To be in Delft, you have to forego the opportunity to look at a Vermeer.

Any number of reasons could be introduced to explain why Vermeer had to have come from Delft, from local painting traditions
to the character of the light that falls on the town. But these reasons do not allow us to conclude that Vermeer would not
have produced paintings just as remarkable had he lived somewhere else in Holland. Context is important, but it doesn’t account
for everything. By the same token, I could put forward any number of reasons to explain why a global history of the intercultural
transformations of seventeenth-century life must start from Delft. But they wouldn’t convince you that Delft was the only
place from which to begin. The fact of the matter is that nothing happened there that particularly changed the course of history,
except possibly art history, and I won’t try to claim otherwise. I start from Delft simply because I happen to have fallen
off my bike there, because Vermeer happened to have lived there, and because I happen to enjoy looking at his paintings. So
long as Delft does not block our view of the seventeenth-century world, these reasons are as good as any for choosing it as
a place to stand and consider the view.

Suppose I were to choose another place from which to tell this story: Shanghai, for instance, since my travels took me there
several years after that first visit to Delft and led to my becoming a historian of China? It would suit the design of this
book, in fact, since Europe and China are the two poles of the magnetic field of interconnection that I describe here. How
much would choosing Shanghai over Delft change the story I am about to tell? It’s possible it would not change a great deal.
Shanghai was actually rather like Delft, if we want to look for similarities below the obvious differences. Like Delft, Shanghai
was built on land that had once been under the ocean, and it depended on water sluices to drain the bogs on which it rests.
(The name Shanghai, which could be translated as On the Ocean, is in fact an abbreviation of Shanghaibang, Upper Ocean Sluice.)
Shanghai similarly was a walled city (though it was walled only in the mid-sixteenth century to protect it against raiders
from Japan). It was crisscrossed with canals and bridges and had direct water access to the ocean. The marketing center for
a productive agricultural economy built on the reclaimed land, it too anchored an artisanal network of commodity production
in the surrounding countryside (cotton textiles in this instance). Shanghai did not have the urban bourgeoisie whom (and for
whom) Vermeer painted, nor perhaps quite the same level of cultivation and sophistication. Its most prominent native son (and
Catholic convert) Xu Guangqi complained in a letter of 1612 that Shanghai was a place of “vulgar manners.” Yet Shanghai’s
wealthy families engaged in practices of patronage and conspicuous consumption, which included buying and showing paintings,
that seem rather like what the merchant elite of Delft were doing. An even more striking coincidence is that Shanghai was
the birthplace of Dong Qichang—the greatest painter and calligrapher of his age—who transformed painting conventions and laid
the foundations of modern Chinese art. It makes no sense to call Dong the Vermeer of China, or Vermeer the Dong of Holland;
but the parallel is too curious to leave unmentioned.

Choosing Delft over Shanghai has something to do with what has survived. When I fell off a bicycle in Delft, I stepped into
a memory of the seventeenth century. Not so when you fall off a bicycle in Shanghai. The past there has been so thoroughly
obliterated by first colonialism, then state socialism, and most recently global capitalism, that the only doors that actually
open onto the Ming dynasty are on library shelves. A wisp of memory lingers in the little streets around Yuyuan, the Garden
of Ease in the heart of what used to be the old city. This garden was founded at the end of the sixteenth century as a retirement
gift for the builder’s father, but around it grew up a small public gathering area where, among other things, artists came
to hang their works to sell. But the area has been so thoroughly built up in the intervening centuries that there is little
to betray what might have existed in the Ming dynasty.