Authors: Timothy Brook
Vermeer's Hat (11 page)
Had Wen Zhenheng gone to the wharves along the Grand Canal, which ran through his city, to inspect the ceramic cargoes being
shipped out to the Dutch, he would have ridiculed what he found. Most of it was carrack porcelain, made for export. Seen through
Wen’s eyes, carrack porcelain was too thick and clumsily painted, and the motifs with which it had been decorated lacked all
delicacy. It was just the sort of junk that you could pawn off on foreigners who didn’t know any better. A Suzhou gentleman
would never have dreamed of passing around snacks in shoddily painted bowls with “high-quality item” written on the bottom
(a mark a lot of the export pieces bore), or serving candied fruit on footed dishes with milky glazes pricked with perforations
and bases bearing fake fifteenth-century dates, or pouring fine tea into cups that had been made only the year before. A snooty
Beijing guidebook of 1635 allows that Jingdezhen potters are still able to turn out the occasional “fine piece” that would
not embarrass its owner, but observes that the true connoisseur would do best to stay away from anything contemporary. When
in doubt, old porcelain was usually the safer choice.
If Europeans were, by Chinese standards, poor judges of what was being unloaded from VOC ships, they were excellent judges
by their own. For what could they compare the Chinese porcelain with but the rough, brittle earthenware plates and jugs that
Italian and Flemish potters produced? These the Chinese wares surpassed in fineness, durability, style, color, and just about
every other ceramic quality. They were beyond the capacity of any European craftsman to reproduce, which is why, as soon as
a VOC ship reached Holland, people came from all over to buy these wares.
At the start of the seventeenth century, when porcelain first began to arrive in northern Europe, the prices it fetched were
high enough to be out of reach of most people. In 1604, when Shakespeare has the comic Pompey in
Measure for Measure
regale Escalus and Angelo with a long-winded account of the last pregnancy of his employer, Mistress Overdone, he tells them
that she called for prunes. “We had but two in the house, which at that very distant time stood, as it were, in a fruit-dish,
a dish of some three-pence;—your honours have seen such dishes; they are not Chinese dishes, but very good dishes.” Mistress
Overdone did well enough as a procuress to be able to afford good dishes, but not Chinese porcelain. The line would not have
worked even just a decade later, when Chinese porcelain started flooding the European market and prices began to come down.
As the author of a history of Amsterdam observed exactly ten years later, “the abundance of porcelain grows daily” such that
Chinese dishes have “come to be with us in nearly daily use with the common people.” By 1640, an Englishman visiting Amsterdam
could testify that “any house of indifferent quality” was well supplied with Chinese porcelain.
The supply of porcelain was all because of what the Amsterdam author called “these navigations,” which were changing the
material lives of Europeans in ways and at a rate that often surprised them. This is why René Descartes was moved in 1631
to call Amsterdam an “inventory of the possible.” The English traveler John Evelyn was equally impressed by Amsterdam when
he visited the city a decade later. He marveled at the “innumerable Assemblys of Shipps, & Vessels which continualy ride before
this Citty, which is certainely the most busie concourse of mortall men, now upon the face of the whole Earth & the most addicted
to commerce.” Amsterdam, however remarkable, was no great exception compared to other urban centers in Europe. When Evelyn
visited Paris three years later, he was struck by “all the Curiosities naturall or artificial imaginable, Indian or European,
for luxury or Use” that “are to be had for mony.” In a market area along the Seine, he was particularly amazed by a shop called
Noah’s Ark in which he found a wonderful assortment of “Cabinets, Shells, Ivorys, Purselan, Dried fishes, rare Insects, Birds,
Pictures, and a thousand exotic extravagances.” Purselan—porcelain—was one of the extravagances one could now easily buy.
The explosive growth of the market for Oriental manufactures soon began to affect their production. Chinese potters had for
centuries been keenly aware of the importance of shaping their wares to foreign tastes, flattening the usual gourdlike shape
of a vase to look like a Turkish flask, or building up dividers on plates to suit Japanese eating habits. As European demand
grew, Chinese porcelain dealers in Southeast Asian ports learned what Europeans liked, then took that knowledge with them
back to their suppliers on the mainland to redesign their products accordingly. When it came to supplying the foreign market,
the potters of Jingdezhen were unconcerned about Wen Zhenheng’s standards of Chinese taste. They wanted to know what would
sell and were ready to change production by the next season to accommodate European taste. When Turkish tulips became all
the rage in northern Europe in the 1620s, for example, Jingdezhen potters painted tulips on their dishes. Never having seen
a real tulip, the porcelain painters produced blooms that are almost unrecognizable as tulips, but that didn’t matter. The
point was that they responded immediately to changes in the market. When the tulip market famously collapsed in 1637, the
VOC rushed to cancel all orders for dishes decorated with tulips, for fear of being stuck with stock no one would buy.
One of the more striking hybrids to emerge from the potteries of Jingdezhen specifically designed to appeal to European taste
is a large soup dish the Dutch called a klapmuts. The shape of this dish was reminiscent of the cheap wool felt hats worn
by the lower classes in Holland, hence the name. Judging from the great number of klapmutsen in the
White Lion
’s hold, this was a popular item, and the name, though it gestured to something unsophisticated, stuck.
The Chinese had no use for such a dish. The problem was soup. Unlike European soup, Chinese soup is closer to broth than stew;
it is a drink, not an entrée. Etiquette, therefore, permits lifting your bowl to your lips to drink it. This is why Chinese
soup bowls have steep vertical sides: to make it easier to drink from the brim. European etiquette forbids lifting the bowl,
hence the need for a big spoon specially designed for the purpose. But try to place a European spoon in a Chinese soup bowl
and over it goes: the sides are too high and the center of gravity not low enough to balance the weight of the handle. Hence
the flattened shape of the klapmuts, with the broad rim on which a European could rest his spoon without accident.
Chinese consumers were not much interested in the export ware made for the Europeans. If the odd piece circulated within China,
it did so purely as a curiosity. The few carrack porcelains that have surfaced in two early-seventeenth-century Chinese graves
probably came into their owners’ possession for this reason. One serving plate decorated in the European style was found in
the grave of a Ming prince who died in 1603, and two pairs of plates in the klapmuts style were found entombed with a provincial
official. Both grave sites are in the province of Jiangxi, where the porcelain manufacturing center Jingdezhen was located,
which helps to explain how these men got hold of these pieces. Why they wanted them is something we can only guess. They may
have regarded the carrack style as a bit of tasty foreign exotica that happened to be locally available. There is an intriguing
convergence here: the upper classes at the opposite ends of the Eurasian continent were both acquiring carrack porcelain,
Chinese because they thought it embodied an exotic Western style, and Europeans because it seemed to them quintessentially
Chinese.
Once VOC ships started delivering their ceramic loads more regularly in the 1610s, Chinese dishes did more than decorate tables,
fill sideboards, and perch atop wardrobes: they appeared on Dutch canvases. The earliest Dutch painting showing a Chinese
plate, by Pieter Isaacsz, was painted in 1599, several years before the first big auctions of captured Portuguese cargo were
making these objects available to Dutch buyers. The first painting to display a klapmuts is a still life by Nicolaes Gillis
painted two years later. Gillis has arranged a litter of fruits, nuts, jugs, and bowls on a table. To us it looks like any
other Dutch still life, but to a viewer in 1601, it featured a Chinese porcelain of the sort that only the wealthiest could
afford, and that most Dutch people had never seen in real life, let alone touched. Gillis could not have afforded to own the
piece he painted. It would be another two years before the cargo of the
San Iago
arrived in Amsterdam, and another decade before Chinese wares were priced within the reach of ordinary buyers. It is therefore
likely that he was painting it on commission for the owner: not just a still life, then, but the portrait of a prized possession.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, a Dutch house was a house decorated with china. Art followed life, and painters
put Chinese dishes into domestic scenes to lend a touch of class as well as a patina of reality. In Delft, Chinese porcelain
started to become available before Vermeer’s lifetime. The flagship of the Delft Chamber of the VOC, the
Wapen van Delft
, sailed twice to Asia, returning in 1627 and 1629 with a combined load of fifteen thousand pieces of porcelain, some of which
would have remained locally. The largest personal collection in the city belonged to Niclaes Verburg, the director of the
Delft Chamber. Verburg could afford whatever his ships brought to Rotterdam and his barges floated up to Delft, for when he
died in 1670, he was the richest man in Delft.
Though not quite in Verburg’s league, Maria Thins aspired that her house should meet current standards of elegant taste. If
Vermeer’s canvases are anything to go by, the Thins-Vermeer household owned several pieces. The klapmuts in
Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window
also appears in
A Woman Asleep
, so that was probably a family possession. The household may also have owned a blue-and-white Chinese ewer, or pitcher, for
one appears behind a lute on a table in
Girl Interrupted at Her Music
. This could not have come directly from the VOC, however, as a European craftsman has gilded the lily by adding a silver
lid. There is also a carrack-style ginger jar sitting on the table at the left-hand side of
Woman with a Pearl Necklace
. The curving reflection of an unseen window to the left on the surface of the jar shows why Vermeer, who was so captivated
by light, must have enjoyed painting something as lustrous as a Chinese pot. On the same table, directly in front of the woman
with the necklace, there is a small bowl with steep curving sides—evidence of yet a fourth Chinese piece in the Thins-Vermeer
collection?
THE PORCELAINS THAT VOC SHIPS brought back to Europe were expensive items of conspicuous consumption that fell into the hands
only of those who could afford them. For everyone else, European ceramics producers came up with import substitutes to cash
in on the taste for things Chinese. Among the most successful were the potters and tile makers of Delft. They were descendants
of sixteenth-century Italians from Faenza (which gave its name to the polychrome earthenware known as faïence) who had migrated
north to Antwerp in the sixteenth century looking for work, and continued farther north to escape the Spanish military efforts
to suppress Dutch independence. They brought their knowledge of ceramics production with them and were able to set up kilns
in Delft’s renowned breweries, many of which had been forced to close down as working-class taste shifted from beer to gin.
In these newly converted potteries, they began to experiment with imitations of the new ceramic aesthetic coming from China,
and buyers liked what they produced.
Delft potters were unable to match the quality of Chinese blue-and-white, but they did manage to produce passable imitations
at a low price. Delftware became the affordable substitute for ordinary people who wanted Chinese porcelain but in the early
years of the VOC trade could not dream of acquiring more than a few pieces. Delft potters did not just imitate; they also
innovated. Their biggest success at the low end of the market was blue-and-white wall tiles for the new houses that the Delft
bourgeoisie were building. The blue of these tiles exuded an enticing whiff of Chineseness, and the sketching style in which
the figures were painted onto their surfaces vaguely replicated what people might have thought of as Chinese. Anthony Bailey
puts it nicely in his biography of Vermeer. “Seldom has long-distance plagiarism produced such an original result—the creation
of a type of folk art.” The industry boomed. By the time Vermeer was painting, a quarter of the city’s labor force was engaged
in one way or another with the ceramics trade. Delft porcelain sold well and widely among those who could not afford the Chinese
product, and the city’s name traveled with the product. Dishes in England became known as “china,” but in Ireland they were
called “delph.”
Delft tiles appear in five of Vermeer’s paintings. As painters and ceramic tile makers were members of the same artisans’
guild, St. Luke’s, of which Vermeer was a headman, he certainly knew the men who owned the kilns. He would even have known
some of the ceramic painters, who enjoyed a status above ordinary tile makers. Vermeer seems to have enjoyed the whimsical
sketches that decorate the tiles—buildings and ships, cupids and soldiers, men peeing and angels smoking—since he reproduces
some of these in his own paintings. He seems to have loved the cobalt blue they used, as it became one of his trademarks as
a colorist. Perhaps in his use of cobalt blue and his detailed re-creations of light on shining surfaces we begin to see the
first hints of a decorative style known as chinoiserie that would overwhelm European taste in the eighteenth century.
Absent concrete evidence, we can still imagine that as a working artist living in one of the VOC chamber towns, Vermeer saw
examples of Chinese painting. We know that several Chinese paintings made it into the collection of Niclaes Verburg, the Delft
VOC director, but these are unlikely to have been shown outside his home. Still, some images of what the Chinese regarded
as beautiful must have been brought back by curious sailors and circulated in the public realm. John Evelyn reports that he
saw unusual foreign pictures in Noah’s Ark in Paris. Were there Chinese paintings among them? When a satirist in Amsterdam
amused his readers by imagining “a painting in which twelve mandarins were sketched with a single stroke of the brush,” he
expected his readers to be familiar with the bold, flowing brushstrokes of Chinese artists. If Chinese paintings were circulating
in the Netherlands, surely Vermeer would have managed to see them.
