Vermeer's Hat

The Card Players is a midcentury Dutch painting, though not a Vermeer. It was painted by Hendrik Van der Burch. The interesting thing about the painting, and what Brook uses as a key into the seventeenth-century world, is the black servant boy in the painting. The boy looks out at the viewer, holding the viewer’s gaze. With this “displaced” individual, Brook points to the movement of people in the seventeenth century. Specifically, he points to the various ways in which people moved, whether voluntarily or not. Movement took place at all levels of society, and included the wealthy and the poor.

The first type of movement typically involved people who were forced to move. This population of people included the ten-year-old servant boy seen in The Card Players. Brook notes how Africans had been traveling to Europe since the fifteenth century. With the seventeenth century’s increase in connectedness and Europe’s lust for forced labor, the flow of African labor intensified, much of it coming from the Low Countries. Brook pointed earlier to the fact that slave labor was a large part of the foundation of the Americas, and the bulk of this slave labor came from the forced movement of people from Africa.