Vermeer's Hat and other stories

I didn't expect Vermeer's Hat to tell us much about Vermeer's life because I understood that precious little was known about it but I thought it might say what is known and also something about the paintings.And so it does, up to a point, but the much bigger point is to lead out from a selection of the paintings to the wider world of the C17th that is so often hinted at from the quiet interiors he is known for.

Thus, Timothy Brook takes us in search of the North-West Passage, on pirate ships to the Americas, sets out the history of porcelain, tobacco, silver and such commodities in a survey of trade, cratsmanship, slavery, horror, shipwrecks that make one's bookish life seem unspeakably mundane in comparison. 

The Dutch were in competition with their rival superpower, Spain, for the benefits of commerce, or whatever they could get, from China which they knew about and eventually found.

A bit like Ian Bostridge's tremendous book, Schubert's Winter Journey, it extends in all directions from its starting point and is 'educational' in the best sense of the word, which means 'opening up all kinds of subjects one might have known nothing of'.

But it also leads to what it might have sold itself as in the first place, a biography of the artist, Vermeer: A View of Delft by Anthony Bailey, which might not be the original biography but which might similarly do more than tell however much can be retrieved or guessed at of the life story.