Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

A New Perspective

Customer Rating:

This book is an interesting new perspective in Vermeer studies, looking at the objects in his paintings from the point of view of the expanding trade networks of the 17th century. It is engagingly written and he wears his scholarship lightly. I was disappointed the author did not investigate Vermeer's famous blue colour (anachronistically called "cobalt blue" in the book), since the ultramarine would itself have come from a complex trade network, and how it came to Delft would itself have made quite a story.

Breathtaking

Customer Rating:

Simply, a beautiful and breathtaking book. Full of marvels and curiousities, each chapter opens out to show the wider maps and ideas we thought we knew about...small details from the paintings are peered closely at, and behind them the seventeenth-century world of travel and trade, narrated through human encounters and stories. He writes wonderfully well and with such clarity about often complex issues, effortlessly moving the focus and scene from place to place: so there's a lovely rhythm about the book as he paces the (frequent) surprises subtly and narrates them with a drole and deceptively easy style. I started to read the other day and was still sat there seven hours later, transfixed by it, slowing up the pace of reading, not wanting it to end.

It didn't sparkle

Customer Rating:

I was a little disappointed in this book. Although its concept sounded very interesting the narrative was a bit flat. The chapters concentrated on one particular object in a painting such as a beaver hat and then went on to explain where that object was most likely to have come from and some background history about, for example, the beaver trade. Unfortunately, the author tended to go on at length about one particular character or location for page after page of a chapter, barely referred back to Vermeer or Delft and, for most chapters, lost my interest. I also felt cheated by the fact that although the book was trailed as a book about Vermeer's paintings separate chapters were included about works not involving Vermeer's paintings so that the author could discuss immigration into Holland and smoking. Admittedly I did learn something about Vermeer and a few interesting facts about seventeenth century life but overall I thought the reviews I had read in newspapers were too generous.