O CARTE DESPRE VERMEER:Timothy Brook--Vermeer's Hat.

Timothy Brook, Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, Profile Books Ltd, 2009

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 this 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.

Biographie de l'auteur

Timothy Brook is a professor of Chinese history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The author of eight books on Chinese history, he is also editor-in-chief of the six-volume History of Imperial China from Harvard University Press. Vermeer's Hat is his most widely read book.