Vermeer's Robe: Costume, Commerce, and Fantasy in the Early Modern Netherlands

Abstract

An important feature of shifting boundaries and identities in Dutch visual culture of the seventeenth century is the representation of costume. An intriguing example is the japonsche rok or simply japon, the Japanese silk robe portrayed, most famously, by Vermeer's Astronomer and Geographer. These rare spoils of Asian trade were first presented annually by Japanese shoguns to VOC officials and thereafter were made available as Western copies. By the end of the seventeenth century, similar robes made of chintz or batik, also known as banyans, were imported from India and went through the same transformation to domestic product. All of these long, loose garments possessed a novelty and cachet unmatched by more abundant imports such as spices, lacquer, porcelain, and precious metals.In art, forms of Asian dress appear not only in portraits of prominent men but also in genre images of scientists and scholars. The resemblances among these garments suggest that Vermeer and other seventeenth-century Dutch painters developed a generic form of costume specifically for portraying men of learning. Scholars, scientists, and doctors, as well as artists, are depicted in variations, or combinations, of Asian and Western garments, mingling associations of imported luxury, work, education, and the classical past. The type of the robed scholar/distinguished man, displayed in portraiture and genre alike, offers a fantasy of class, intellect, and materialism. Its representation in art creates an interplay between exotic consumption and artistic invention, fuelled by the unprecedented power of global trade.

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