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The Milkmaid (Vermeer)
Encyclopedia
The Milkmaid sometimes called The Kitchen Maid, is an oil-on-canvas painting of a "milkmaid", in fact a domestic kitchen maid, by the Dutch
artist Johannes Vermeer
. It is housed in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
, Netherlands
, which esteems it as "unquestionably one of the museum's finest attractions".
The exact year of the painting's completion is unknown, with estimates varying by source. The Rijksmuseum estimates it as circa 1658. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York City
, it was painted in about 1657 or 1658. The "Essential Vermeer" website gives a broader range of 1658–1661.
") on a table. Also on the table are various types of bread. She is a young, sturdily built woman wearing a crisp linen cap, a blue apron and work sleeves pushed up from thick forearms. A foot warmer is on the floor behind her, near Delft wall tiles
depicting Cupid
(to the viewer's left) and a figure with a pole (to the right). Intense light streams from the window
on the left side of the canvas.
The painting is strikingly illusionistic, conveying not just details but a sense of the weight of the woman and the table. "The light, though bright, doesn't wash out the rough texture of the bread crusts or flatten the volumes of the maid's thick waist and rounded shoulders", wrote Karen Rosenberg, an art critic
for The New York Times
. Yet with half of the woman's face in shadow, it is "impossible to tell whether her downcast eyes and pursed lips express wistfulness or concentration," she wrote.
"It's a little bit of a Mona Lisa
effect" in modern viewers' reactions to the painting, according to Walter Liedtke, curator
of the department of European paintings at The Museum of Modern Art
, and organizer of two Vermeer exhibits. "There's a bit of mystery about her for modern audiences. She is going about her daily task, faintly smiling. And our reaction is 'What is she thinking?'"
" at the time the painting was created: "milk maids" were women who milked cows; kitchen maids worked in kitchens. For at least two centuries before the painting was created, milkmaids and kitchen maids had a reputation as being predisposed to love or sex, and this was frequently reflected in Dutch paintings of kitchen and market scenes from Antwerp, Utrecht
and Delft. Some of the paintings were slyly suggestive, like The Milkmaid, others more coarsely so.
The leading artists in this tradition were the Antwerp painters Joachim Beuckelaer
(c. 1535–1575) and Frans Snyders (1579–1657), who had many followers and imitators, as well as Pieter Aertsen
(who, like Beukelaer, had clients in Delft), the Utrecht Mannerist painter Joachim Wtewael
(1566–1638), and his son, Peter Wtewael
(1596–1660). Closer to Vermeer's day, Nicolaes Maes
painted several comic pictures now given titles such as The Lazy Servant. However by this time there was an alternative convention of painting women at work in the home as exemplars of Dutch domestic virtue, dealt with at length by Simon Schama
.
In Dutch literature and paintings of Vermeer's time, maids were often depicted as subjects of male desire—dangerous women threatening the honor and security of the home, the center of Dutch life—although some Vermeer contemporaries, such as Pieter de Hooch
, had started to represent them in a more neutral way, as did Michael Sweerts. Vermeer's painting is one of the rare examples of a maid treated in an empathetic and dignified way, although amorous symbols in this work still exemplify the tradition.
Other painters in this tradition, such as Gerrit Dou
(1613–1675), depicted attractive maids with symbolic objects such as jugs and various forms of game and produce. "In almost all the works of this tradition there is an erotic element, which is conveyed through gestures ranging from jamming chickens onto spits to gently offering — or so the direction of view suggests — an intimate glimpse of some vaguely uterine object," according to Liedtke. In Dou's 1646 painting, Girl Chopping Onions (now in the British Royal Collection
), a pewter tankard may refer to both male and female anatomy, and the picture contains other contemporary symbols of lust, such as onions (said to have aphrodisical properties), and a dangling bird. Milk also had lewd connotations, from the slang term melken, defined as "to sexually attract or lure" (a meaning that may have originated from watching farm girls working under cows, according to Liedtke). Examples of works using milk this way include Lucas van Leyden
's engraving
The Milkmaid (1510) and Jacques de Gheyn II's engraving The Archer and the Milkmaid (about 1610).
Vermeer's painting is even more understated, although the use of symbols remains: one of the Delft tiles at the foot of the wall behind the maid, near the foot warmer, depicts Cupid – which can imply arousal of a woman or simply that while she is working she is daydreaming about a man. Other amorous symbols in the painting include a wide-mouthed jug, often used as a symbol of the female anatomy. The foot warmer was often used by artists as a symbol for female sexual arousal because, when placed under a skirt, it heats the whole body below the waist, according to Liedtke. The coals enclosed inside the foot warmer could symbolize "either the heat of lust in tavern or brothel scenes, or the hidden but true burning passion of a woman for her husband", according to Serena Cant, a British art historian and lecturer. Yet the whitewashed wall and presence of milk seem to indicate that the room was a "cool kitchen" used for cooking with dairy products, such as milk and butter, so the foot warmer would have a pragmatic purpose there. Since other Dutch paintings of the period indicate that foot warmers were used when seated, its presence in the picture may symbolize the standing woman's "hardworking nature", according to Cant.
The painting is part of a social context of the sexual or romantic interactions of maids and men of higher social ranks that has now disappeared in Europe and never commonly recognized in America, according to Liedtke, who offers as an example Vermeer's contemporary, Samuel Pepys
, whose diary records encounters with kitchen maids, oyster girls and, at an inn during a 1660 visit to Delft, with "an exceedingly pretty lass and right for the sport". The painting was first owned by (and may have been painted for) Pieter van Ruijven, owner of several other paintings by Vermeer which also depicted attractive young women and with themes of desire and self-denial quite different from the attitude of Pepys and many of the paintings in the Dutch "kitchenmaid" tradition.
In Dutch, Het Melkmeisje is the painting's most-used name. Although this title is less accurate in modern Dutch, the word "meid" (maid) has gained a negative tone that is not present in its diminutive
form ("meisje")—hence the use of the more friendly title for the work, used by the Rijksmuseum and others.
, which would account for the milk and the broken pieces of bread on the table. Rand assumed she would have already made custard
in which the bread mixed with egg would be soaking at the moment depicted in the painting. She pours milk into the Dutch oven to cover the mixture because otherwise the bread, if not simmering in liquid while it is baking, will become an unappetizing, dry crust instead of forming the typical upper surface of the pudding. She is careful in pouring the trickle of milk because bread pudding can be ruined when the ingredients are not accurately measured or properly combined.
By depicting the working maid in the act of careful cooking, the artist presents not just a picture of an everyday scene, but one with ethical and social value. The humble woman is using common ingredients and otherwise useless stale bread to create a pleasurable product for the household. "Her measured demeanor, modest dress and judiciousness in preparing her food conveys eloquently yet unobtrusively one of the strongest values of 17th-century Netherlands, domestic virtue", according to the Essential Vermeer website.
"In the end, it is not the allusions to female sexuality that give this painting its romance or emotional resonance — it is the depiction of honest, hard work as something romantic in and of itself," Raquel Laneri wrote in Forbes magazine. "The Milkmaid elevates the drudgery of housework and servitude to virtuous, even heroic, levels."
The photograph-like realism of the painting resembles that of Leiden artists such as Dou, Frans van Mieris
, and Gabriël Metsu
. Vermeer, who was age twenty-five when he painted this work, was "shopping around in Dutch art for different styles and subjects", according to Liedtke. "He's looking, in this case, mainly at artists like Gerrit Dou and others who work in a meticulous, illusionistic way." Liedtke sees the work as either Vermeer's "last early work or first mature work". The curator added, "I almost think he had to explore what you mightt call 'tactile illusionism' to understand where he really wanted to go, which was in the more optical, light-filled direction."
Characteristic of Delft artistry and of Vermeer's work, the painting also has a "classic balance" of figurative elements and an "extraordinary treatment of light", according to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The wall on the left, according to Liedtke, "gets you very quickly in the picture—that recession from the left and then the openness to the right—and this sort of left-corner scheme was used for about 10 years before Vermeer, and he was very quick to pick up the latest thing."
"Nowhere else in his oeuvre does one find such a sculptural figure and such seemingly tangible objects, and yet the future painter of luminous interiors has already arrived," according to the museum. The "pointillé
pattern of bright dots on the bread and basket" are the "most effusive" use of that scheme in any Vermeer painting, and it appears to be used to suggest "scintillating daylight and rough textures at the same time."
Vermeer painted over two items originally in the painting. One was a large wall map (a Rijksmuseum web page calls it a painting) behind the upper part of the woman's body. (A wall map may not have been very out of place in a humble workroom such as the cold kitchen where the maid toiled: large maps in 17th-century Holland were inexpensive ways of decorating bare walls.) He originally placed a large, conspicuous clothes basket (the Rijksmuseum web page calls it a "sewing basket") near the bottom of the painting, behind the maid's red skirt, but then the artist painted it over, producing the slight shift in tone (pentimento
) on the wall behind the foot warmer. The basket was later discovered with an X-ray
. Other Vermeer paintings also have images removed. Some art critics have thought the removals may have been intended to provide the works with better thematic focus.
"[I]ts rustic immediacy differs from Vermeer's later paintings," according to Laneri. "There is a tactile, visceral quality to The Milkmaid — you can almost taste the thick, creamy milk escaping the jug, feel the cool dampness of the room and the starchy linen of the maid's white cap, touch her sculptural shoulders and corseted waist. She is not an apparition or abstraction. She is not the ideal, worldly housewife of Vermeer's later Young Woman with a Water Pitcher
or the ethereal beauty in Girl with a Pearl Earring
. She is not the cartoonish buxom vixen in Leyden's drawing. She is real — as real as a painting can get anyway."
, compared with his contemporaries, was his preference for the expensive natural ultramarine
(made from crushed lapis lazuli
) where other painters typically used the much cheaper azurite
. Along with the ultramarine, lead-tin yellow is also a dominant color in an exceptionally luminous work (with a much less somber and conventional rendering of light than any of Vermeer's previous extant works). Depicting white walls was a challenge for artists in Vermeer's time, with his contemporaries using various forms of gray pigment. Here the white walls reflect the daylight with different intensities, displaying the effects of uneven textures on the plastered surfaces. The artist here used white lead
, umber
and charcoal black. Although the formula was widely known among Vermeer's contemporary genre painters, "perhaps no artist more than Vermeer was able to use it so effectively", according to the Essential Vermeer website.
The woman's coarse features are painted with thick dabs of impasto
. The seeds on the crust of the bread, as well as the crust itself, along with the plaited handles of the bread basket, are rendered with pointillé dots. Soft parts of the bread are rendered with thin swirls of paint, with dabs of ochre
used to show the rough edges of broken crust. One piece of bread to the viewer's right and close to the Dutch oven, has a broad band of yellow, different from the crust, which Cant believes is a suggestion that the piece is going stale. The small roll at the far right has thick impastoed dots that resemble a knobbly crust or a crust with seeds on it. The bread and basket, despite being closer to the viewer, are painted in a more diffuse way than the illusionistic realism of the wall, with its stains, shadowing, nail and nail hole, or the seams and fastenings of the woman's dress, the gleaming, polished brass container hanging from the wall. The panes of glass in the window are varied in a very realistic way, with a crack in one (fourth row from the bottom, far right) reflected on the wood of the window frame. Just below that pane, another has a scratch, indicated with a thin white line. Another pane (second row from the bottom, second from right) is pushed inward within its frame.
The discrepancy between objects at various distances from the viewer may indicate Vermeer used a camera obscura
, according to Cant. Liedtke points out that a pinhole discovered in the canvas "has really punctured the theory of the camera obscura [...] The idea that Vermeer traced compositions in an optical device [...] is rather naive when you consider that the light lasts maybe 10 seconds, but the painting took at least months to paint." Instead, The pin in the canvas would have been tied to a string with chalk on it, which the painter would have snapped to get perspective lines, Liedtke said in a 2009 interview.
The woman's bulky green oversleeves were painted with the same yellow and blue paint used in the rest of the woman's clothing, worked at the same time in a wet-on-wet
method. Broad strokes in the painting of the clothing suggests coarse, thick texture of the work clothing. The blue cuff uses a lighter mixture of ultramarine and lead-white, together with a layer of ochre painted beneath it. The brilliant blue of the skirt or apron has been intensified with a glaze (a thin, transparent top layer) of the same color. The glazing helps suggest that the blue material is a less coarse fabric than the yellow bodice, according to Cant.
(1624–1674), Vermeer's patron in Delft (and, at his death, the owner of twenty-one of the painter's works), probably bought the painting directly from the artist. Liedtke doubts that the patron ordered the subject matter. Ownership later passed on, perhaps to his widow, Maria de Knuijt, probably their daughter, Magdelene van Ruijven (1655–1681), and certainly to Van Ruijven's son-in-law, Jacob Dissius
(1653–1695), whose estate sold it with other paintings by the artist in 1696. Records of that sale described The Milkmaid as "exceptionally good", and the work brought the second-highest price in the sale (175 guilder
s, exceeded only by the 200 guilders paid for Vermeer's cityscape, View of Delft
).
In the 18th century, English painter and critic Joshua Reynolds
praised the work for its striking quality. In 1719, "the famous milkmaid, by Vermeer of Delft, artful", was auctioned and went through at least five Amsterdam collections before it became part of what The Metropolitan Museum of Art called "one of the great collectors of Dutch art", that of Lucretia Johanna van Winter (1785–1845). In 1822 she married into the Six family
of collectors, and in 1908 her two sons sold the painting (as part of the famous Six collection of thirty-nine works) to the Rijksmuseum, which acquired the works with support from the Dutch government and the Rembrandt Society — but not before a good deal of public squabbling and the intervention of the States-General
or Dutch parliament.
in Amsterdam. Other European exhibits showing the work include the Royal Academy of Arts ("Exhibition of Dutch Art", London) in 1929; Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume
("Exposition hollandaise: Tableaux, aqwuarelles et dessíns anciens et modernes", Paris) in 1921; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
("Vermeer, oorsprong en involoed: Frabritius, De Hooch, De Witte", Rotterdam) in 1935.
It was exhibited at the 1939 World's Fair
in New York City, and the outbreak of World War II
during the fair – with the German
occupation of the Netherlands – caused the work to remain in the U.S. until Holland was liberated. During this time it was displayed at the Detroit Institute of Arts
in Michigan
(the museum where the curator of the World's Fair exhibit was working), and was included in that museum's exhibition catalogues in 1939 and 1941. During the war, the work was also displayed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was hanging as late as 1944, according to Leidtke. In 1953, the Kunsthaus Zurich
displayed the painting in an exhibition, and the next year it traveled to Italy for an exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizione in Rome and the Palazzo Reale in Milan. In 1966, it was part of an exhibition at the Mauritshuis
in the Hague and the Musée de l'Orangerie
in Paris. In 1999 and 2000 the painting was at the National Gallery of Art
in Washington for its exhibition "Johannes Vermeer: The Art of Painting", and it was part of the "Vermeer and the Delft School" exhibition at the National Gallery, London from June 20 to September 16, 2001 (it did not appear at the Metropolitan Museum of Art venue of that exhibition, earlier that year).
The painting returned to New York in 2009, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson
's historic voyage (Amsterdam to Manhattan), where it was the central feature of a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, alongside several of the museum's five Vermeer works and other Dutch Golden Age painting
s.
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
artist Johannes Vermeer
Johannes Vermeer
Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer was a Dutch painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime...
. It is housed in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
, Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
, which esteems it as "unquestionably one of the museum's finest attractions".
The exact year of the painting's completion is unknown, with estimates varying by source. The Rijksmuseum estimates it as circa 1658. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, it was painted in about 1657 or 1658. The "Essential Vermeer" website gives a broader range of 1658–1661.
Descriptions and commentary
Despite its traditional title, the picture clearly shows a kitchen or housemaid (a low-ranking servant) in a plain room carefully pouring milk into a squat earthenware container (now commonly known as a "Dutch ovenDutch oven
A Dutch oven is a thick-walled cooking pot with a tight-fitting lid. Dutch ovens have been used as cooking vessels for hundreds of years....
") on a table. Also on the table are various types of bread. She is a young, sturdily built woman wearing a crisp linen cap, a blue apron and work sleeves pushed up from thick forearms. A foot warmer is on the floor behind her, near Delft wall tiles
Delftware
Delftware, or Delft pottery, denotes blue and white pottery made in and around Delft in the Netherlands and the tin-glazed pottery made in the Netherlands from the 16th century....
depicting Cupid
Cupid
In Roman mythology, Cupid is the god of desire, affection and erotic love. He is the son of the goddess Venus and the god Mars. His Greek counterpart is Eros...
(to the viewer's left) and a figure with a pole (to the right). Intense light streams from the window
Window
A window is a transparent or translucent opening in a wall or door that allows the passage of light and, if not closed or sealed, air and sound. Windows are usually glazed or covered in some other transparent or translucent material like float glass. Windows are held in place by frames, which...
on the left side of the canvas.
The painting is strikingly illusionistic, conveying not just details but a sense of the weight of the woman and the table. "The light, though bright, doesn't wash out the rough texture of the bread crusts or flatten the volumes of the maid's thick waist and rounded shoulders", wrote Karen Rosenberg, an art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
. Yet with half of the woman's face in shadow, it is "impossible to tell whether her downcast eyes and pursed lips express wistfulness or concentration," she wrote.
"It's a little bit of a Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa is a portrait by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is a painting in oil on a poplar panel, completed circa 1503–1519...
effect" in modern viewers' reactions to the painting, according to Walter Liedtke, curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
of the department of European paintings at The Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, and organizer of two Vermeer exhibits. "There's a bit of mystery about her for modern audiences. She is going about her daily task, faintly smiling. And our reaction is 'What is she thinking?'"
Dutch iconography of maids
The woman would have been known as a "kitchen maid" or maid-of-all-work rather than a "milkmaidMilkmaid
A milkmaid is a girl or woman employed to milk dairy cows. She also used the milk to prepare dairy products such as cream, butter, and cheese...
" at the time the painting was created: "milk maids" were women who milked cows; kitchen maids worked in kitchens. For at least two centuries before the painting was created, milkmaids and kitchen maids had a reputation as being predisposed to love or sex, and this was frequently reflected in Dutch paintings of kitchen and market scenes from Antwerp, Utrecht
Utrecht (city)
Utrecht city and municipality is the capital and most populous city of the Dutch province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, and is the fourth largest city of the Netherlands with a population of 312,634 on 1 Jan 2011.Utrecht's ancient city centre features...
and Delft. Some of the paintings were slyly suggestive, like The Milkmaid, others more coarsely so.
The leading artists in this tradition were the Antwerp painters Joachim Beuckelaer
Joachim Beuckelaer
Joachim Beuckelaer was a Flemish painter.A native of Antwerp, he studied under his uncle, Pieter Aertsen. Many of his paintings contain scenes of kitchen and markets, with religious allusions in the background. His Four Elements series exemplifies this theme on a large scale...
(c. 1535–1575) and Frans Snyders (1579–1657), who had many followers and imitators, as well as Pieter Aertsen
Pieter Aertsen
Pieter Aertsen , called Lange Pier because of his height, was a Dutch historical painter. He was born and died in Amsterdam, and painted there and in Antwerp, though his genre scenes were influential in Italy.-Biography:...
(who, like Beukelaer, had clients in Delft), the Utrecht Mannerist painter Joachim Wtewael
Joachim Wtewael
Joachim Anthonisz Wtewael , was a notable Dutch painter and engraver.Wtewael was born and died in Utrecht, where he began his career engraving glass with his father...
(1566–1638), and his son, Peter Wtewael
Peter Wtewael
Peter Wtewael was a Dutch Golden Age painter.-Biography:Wtewael was born in Utrecht, son of the Dutch painter and engraver Joachim Wtewael and brother to the painter Johan Wtewael. According to the RKD he is known as a follower of Caravaggio. He specialized in painting kitchen scenes and...
(1596–1660). Closer to Vermeer's day, Nicolaes Maes
Nicolaes Maes
Nicolaes Maes, also known as Nicolaes Maas was a Dutch Golden Age painter of genre and portraits.-Biography:...
painted several comic pictures now given titles such as The Lazy Servant. However by this time there was an alternative convention of painting women at work in the home as exemplars of Dutch domestic virtue, dealt with at length by Simon Schama
Simon Schama
Simon Michael Schama, CBE is a British historian and art historian. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain...
.
In Dutch literature and paintings of Vermeer's time, maids were often depicted as subjects of male desire—dangerous women threatening the honor and security of the home, the center of Dutch life—although some Vermeer contemporaries, such as Pieter de Hooch
Pieter de Hooch
Pieter de Hooch was a genre painter during the Dutch Golden Age. He was a contemporary of Dutch Master Jan Vermeer, with whom his work shared themes and style.-Biography:...
, had started to represent them in a more neutral way, as did Michael Sweerts. Vermeer's painting is one of the rare examples of a maid treated in an empathetic and dignified way, although amorous symbols in this work still exemplify the tradition.
Other painters in this tradition, such as Gerrit Dou
Gerard Dou
Gerrit Dou , also known as Gerard and Douw or Dow, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, whose small, highly-polished paintings are typical of the Leiden fijnschilders...
(1613–1675), depicted attractive maids with symbolic objects such as jugs and various forms of game and produce. "In almost all the works of this tradition there is an erotic element, which is conveyed through gestures ranging from jamming chickens onto spits to gently offering — or so the direction of view suggests — an intimate glimpse of some vaguely uterine object," according to Liedtke. In Dou's 1646 painting, Girl Chopping Onions (now in the British Royal Collection
Royal Collection
The Royal Collection is the art collection of the British Royal Family. It is property of the monarch as sovereign, but is held in trust for her successors and the nation. It contains over 7,000 paintings, 40,000 watercolours and drawings, and about 150,000 old master prints, as well as historical...
), a pewter tankard may refer to both male and female anatomy, and the picture contains other contemporary symbols of lust, such as onions (said to have aphrodisical properties), and a dangling bird. Milk also had lewd connotations, from the slang term melken, defined as "to sexually attract or lure" (a meaning that may have originated from watching farm girls working under cows, according to Liedtke). Examples of works using milk this way include Lucas van Leyden
Lucas van Leyden
Lucas van Leyden , also named either Lucas Hugensz or Lucas Jacobsz, was a Dutch engraver and painter, born and mainly active in Leiden...
's engraving
Engraving
Engraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...
The Milkmaid (1510) and Jacques de Gheyn II's engraving The Archer and the Milkmaid (about 1610).
Vermeer's painting is even more understated, although the use of symbols remains: one of the Delft tiles at the foot of the wall behind the maid, near the foot warmer, depicts Cupid – which can imply arousal of a woman or simply that while she is working she is daydreaming about a man. Other amorous symbols in the painting include a wide-mouthed jug, often used as a symbol of the female anatomy. The foot warmer was often used by artists as a symbol for female sexual arousal because, when placed under a skirt, it heats the whole body below the waist, according to Liedtke. The coals enclosed inside the foot warmer could symbolize "either the heat of lust in tavern or brothel scenes, or the hidden but true burning passion of a woman for her husband", according to Serena Cant, a British art historian and lecturer. Yet the whitewashed wall and presence of milk seem to indicate that the room was a "cool kitchen" used for cooking with dairy products, such as milk and butter, so the foot warmer would have a pragmatic purpose there. Since other Dutch paintings of the period indicate that foot warmers were used when seated, its presence in the picture may symbolize the standing woman's "hardworking nature", according to Cant.
The painting is part of a social context of the sexual or romantic interactions of maids and men of higher social ranks that has now disappeared in Europe and never commonly recognized in America, according to Liedtke, who offers as an example Vermeer's contemporary, Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys FRS, MP, JP, was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man...
, whose diary records encounters with kitchen maids, oyster girls and, at an inn during a 1660 visit to Delft, with "an exceedingly pretty lass and right for the sport". The painting was first owned by (and may have been painted for) Pieter van Ruijven, owner of several other paintings by Vermeer which also depicted attractive young women and with themes of desire and self-denial quite different from the attitude of Pepys and many of the paintings in the Dutch "kitchenmaid" tradition.
In Dutch, Het Melkmeisje is the painting's most-used name. Although this title is less accurate in modern Dutch, the word "meid" (maid) has gained a negative tone that is not present in its diminutive
Diminutive
In language structure, a diminutive, or diminutive form , is a formation of a word used to convey a slight degree of the root meaning, smallness of the object or quality named, encapsulation, intimacy, or endearment...
form ("meisje")—hence the use of the more friendly title for the work, used by the Rijksmuseum and others.
Narrative and thematic elements
According to art historian Harry Rand, the painting suggests the woman is making bread puddingBread pudding
Bread pudding is a bread-based dessert popular in many countries' cuisine, including that of Great Britain, France, Belgium, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Malta, Argentina, Louisiana Creole, and the southern United States...
, which would account for the milk and the broken pieces of bread on the table. Rand assumed she would have already made custard
Custard
Custard is a variety of culinary preparations based on a cooked mixture of milk or cream and egg yolk. Depending on how much egg or thickener is used, custard may vary in consistency from a thin pouring sauce , to a thick pastry cream used to fill éclairs. The most common custards are used as...
in which the bread mixed with egg would be soaking at the moment depicted in the painting. She pours milk into the Dutch oven to cover the mixture because otherwise the bread, if not simmering in liquid while it is baking, will become an unappetizing, dry crust instead of forming the typical upper surface of the pudding. She is careful in pouring the trickle of milk because bread pudding can be ruined when the ingredients are not accurately measured or properly combined.
By depicting the working maid in the act of careful cooking, the artist presents not just a picture of an everyday scene, but one with ethical and social value. The humble woman is using common ingredients and otherwise useless stale bread to create a pleasurable product for the household. "Her measured demeanor, modest dress and judiciousness in preparing her food conveys eloquently yet unobtrusively one of the strongest values of 17th-century Netherlands, domestic virtue", according to the Essential Vermeer website.
"In the end, it is not the allusions to female sexuality that give this painting its romance or emotional resonance — it is the depiction of honest, hard work as something romantic in and of itself," Raquel Laneri wrote in Forbes magazine. "The Milkmaid elevates the drudgery of housework and servitude to virtuous, even heroic, levels."
Compositional strategy
An impression of monumentality and "perhaps a sense of dignity" is lent to the image by the artist's choice of a relatively low vantage point and a pyramidal building up of forms from the left foreground to the woman's head, according to a web page of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. According to the Rijksmuseum, the painting "is built up along two diagonal lines. They meet by the woman's right wrist." This focuses the attention of he viewer on the pouring of the milk.The photograph-like realism of the painting resembles that of Leiden artists such as Dou, Frans van Mieris
Frans van Mieris
Frans van Mieris is the name of:* Frans van Mieris, Sr., Dutch painter* Frans van Mieris, Jr., his grandson, Dutch painter...
, and Gabriël Metsu
Gabriel Metsu
Gabriël Metsu was a Dutch painter of history paintings, genre works and portraits.- Life :Metsu was the son of the Flemish painter Jacques Metsu , who lived most of his days at Leiden, and Jacomijntje Garniers, his third wife, whom he married in 1625. Jacomijntje was the widow of a painter with...
. Vermeer, who was age twenty-five when he painted this work, was "shopping around in Dutch art for different styles and subjects", according to Liedtke. "He's looking, in this case, mainly at artists like Gerrit Dou and others who work in a meticulous, illusionistic way." Liedtke sees the work as either Vermeer's "last early work or first mature work". The curator added, "I almost think he had to explore what you mightt call 'tactile illusionism' to understand where he really wanted to go, which was in the more optical, light-filled direction."
Characteristic of Delft artistry and of Vermeer's work, the painting also has a "classic balance" of figurative elements and an "extraordinary treatment of light", according to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The wall on the left, according to Liedtke, "gets you very quickly in the picture—that recession from the left and then the openness to the right—and this sort of left-corner scheme was used for about 10 years before Vermeer, and he was very quick to pick up the latest thing."
"Nowhere else in his oeuvre does one find such a sculptural figure and such seemingly tangible objects, and yet the future painter of luminous interiors has already arrived," according to the museum. The "pointillé
Pointillé
Pointillé is a decorative technique in which patterns are formed on a surface by a means of punched dots. The technique is similar to embossing or engraving but is done manually and does not cut into the surface being decorated. Pointillé was commonly used to decorate arms and armor starting in...
pattern of bright dots on the bread and basket" are the "most effusive" use of that scheme in any Vermeer painting, and it appears to be used to suggest "scintillating daylight and rough textures at the same time."
Vermeer painted over two items originally in the painting. One was a large wall map (a Rijksmuseum web page calls it a painting) behind the upper part of the woman's body. (A wall map may not have been very out of place in a humble workroom such as the cold kitchen where the maid toiled: large maps in 17th-century Holland were inexpensive ways of decorating bare walls.) He originally placed a large, conspicuous clothes basket (the Rijksmuseum web page calls it a "sewing basket") near the bottom of the painting, behind the maid's red skirt, but then the artist painted it over, producing the slight shift in tone (pentimento
Pentimento
A pentimento is an alteration in a painting, evidenced by traces of previous work, showing that the artist has changed his mind as to the composition during the process of painting...
) on the wall behind the foot warmer. The basket was later discovered with an X-ray
X-ray
X-radiation is a form of electromagnetic radiation. X-rays have a wavelength in the range of 0.01 to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30 petahertz to 30 exahertz and energies in the range 120 eV to 120 keV. They are shorter in wavelength than UV rays and longer than gamma...
. Other Vermeer paintings also have images removed. Some art critics have thought the removals may have been intended to provide the works with better thematic focus.
"[I]ts rustic immediacy differs from Vermeer's later paintings," according to Laneri. "There is a tactile, visceral quality to The Milkmaid — you can almost taste the thick, creamy milk escaping the jug, feel the cool dampness of the room and the starchy linen of the maid's white cap, touch her sculptural shoulders and corseted waist. She is not an apparition or abstraction. She is not the ideal, worldly housewife of Vermeer's later Young Woman with a Water Pitcher
Woman with a Water Jug
Woman with a Water Jug, also known as Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, is a painting finished between 1660–1662 by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer in the Baroque style...
or the ethereal beauty in Girl with a Pearl Earring
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Girl with a Pearl Earring is a painting by Johannes Vermeer.Girl With a Pearl Earring may also refer to:* Girl with a Pearl Earring , by Tracy Chevalier* Girl with a Pearl Earring...
. She is not the cartoonish buxom vixen in Leyden's drawing. She is real — as real as a painting can get anyway."
Technique and materials
This painting has "perhaps, the most brilliant color scheme of his oeuvre", according to the Essential Vermeer website. One of the distinctions of Vermeer's palettePalette (painting)
A palette , in the original sense of the word, is a rigid, flat surface on which a painter arranges and mixes paints. A palette is usually made of wood, plastic, ceramic, or other hard, inert, nonporous material, and can vary greatly in size and shape...
, compared with his contemporaries, was his preference for the expensive natural ultramarine
Ultramarine
Ultramarine is a blue pigment consisting primarily of a double silicate of aluminium and sodium with some sulfides or sulfates, and occurring in nature as a proximate component of lapis lazuli...
(made from crushed lapis lazuli
Lapis lazuli
Lapis lazuli is a relatively rare semi-precious stone that has been prized since antiquity for its intense blue color....
) where other painters typically used the much cheaper azurite
Azurite
Azurite is a soft, deep blue copper mineral produced by weathering of copper ore deposits. It is also known as Chessylite after the type locality at Chessy-les-Mines near Lyon, France...
. Along with the ultramarine, lead-tin yellow is also a dominant color in an exceptionally luminous work (with a much less somber and conventional rendering of light than any of Vermeer's previous extant works). Depicting white walls was a challenge for artists in Vermeer's time, with his contemporaries using various forms of gray pigment. Here the white walls reflect the daylight with different intensities, displaying the effects of uneven textures on the plastered surfaces. The artist here used white lead
White lead
White lead is the chemical compound 2·Pb2. It was formerly used as an ingredient for lead paint and a cosmetic called Venetian Ceruse, because its opaque quality made it a good pigment. However, it tended to cause lead poisoning, and its use has been banned in most countries.White lead has been...
, umber
Umber
Umber is a natural brown clay pigment which contains iron and manganese oxides. The color becomes more intense when calcined , and the resulting pigment is called burnt umber. Its name derives from the Latin word umbra and was originally extracted in Umbria, a mountainous region of central Italy,...
and charcoal black. Although the formula was widely known among Vermeer's contemporary genre painters, "perhaps no artist more than Vermeer was able to use it so effectively", according to the Essential Vermeer website.
The woman's coarse features are painted with thick dabs of impasto
Impasto
In English, the borrowed Italian word impasto most commonly refers to a technique used in painting, where paint is laid on an area of the surface very thickly, usually thickly enough that the brush or painting-knife strokes are visible. Paint can also be mixed right on the canvas...
. The seeds on the crust of the bread, as well as the crust itself, along with the plaited handles of the bread basket, are rendered with pointillé dots. Soft parts of the bread are rendered with thin swirls of paint, with dabs of ochre
Ochre
Ochre is the term for both a golden-yellow or light yellow brown color and for a form of earth pigment which produces the color. The pigment can also be used to create a reddish tint known as "red ochre". The more rarely used terms "purple ochre" and "brown ochre" also exist for variant hues...
used to show the rough edges of broken crust. One piece of bread to the viewer's right and close to the Dutch oven, has a broad band of yellow, different from the crust, which Cant believes is a suggestion that the piece is going stale. The small roll at the far right has thick impastoed dots that resemble a knobbly crust or a crust with seeds on it. The bread and basket, despite being closer to the viewer, are painted in a more diffuse way than the illusionistic realism of the wall, with its stains, shadowing, nail and nail hole, or the seams and fastenings of the woman's dress, the gleaming, polished brass container hanging from the wall. The panes of glass in the window are varied in a very realistic way, with a crack in one (fourth row from the bottom, far right) reflected on the wood of the window frame. Just below that pane, another has a scratch, indicated with a thin white line. Another pane (second row from the bottom, second from right) is pushed inward within its frame.
The discrepancy between objects at various distances from the viewer may indicate Vermeer used a camera obscura
Camera obscura
The camera obscura is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side...
, according to Cant. Liedtke points out that a pinhole discovered in the canvas "has really punctured the theory of the camera obscura [...] The idea that Vermeer traced compositions in an optical device [...] is rather naive when you consider that the light lasts maybe 10 seconds, but the painting took at least months to paint." Instead, The pin in the canvas would have been tied to a string with chalk on it, which the painter would have snapped to get perspective lines, Liedtke said in a 2009 interview.
The woman's bulky green oversleeves were painted with the same yellow and blue paint used in the rest of the woman's clothing, worked at the same time in a wet-on-wet
Wet-on-wet
Wet-on-wet is a painting technique in which layers of wet paint are applied to previous layers of wet paint. This technique requires a fast way of working, because the art work has to be finished before the first layers have dried....
method. Broad strokes in the painting of the clothing suggests coarse, thick texture of the work clothing. The blue cuff uses a lighter mixture of ultramarine and lead-white, together with a layer of ochre painted beneath it. The brilliant blue of the skirt or apron has been intensified with a glaze (a thin, transparent top layer) of the same color. The glazing helps suggest that the blue material is a less coarse fabric than the yellow bodice, according to Cant.
Provenance
Pieter van RuijvenPieter van Ruijven
Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven is known as Johannes Vermeer's patron. In 1657, he lent Vermeer 200 guilders. It is not known if he had any trade or profession. Like his father, he worked for the city institution, the Camer van Charitate .In 1653, he married Maria de Knuijt. The couple had one daughter...
(1624–1674), Vermeer's patron in Delft (and, at his death, the owner of twenty-one of the painter's works), probably bought the painting directly from the artist. Liedtke doubts that the patron ordered the subject matter. Ownership later passed on, perhaps to his widow, Maria de Knuijt, probably their daughter, Magdelene van Ruijven (1655–1681), and certainly to Van Ruijven's son-in-law, Jacob Dissius
Jacob Dissius
Jacob Abrahamsz. Dissius was a Dutch typographer and printer. He is most notable as an art collector and for his links to Johannes Vermeer - his collection included 21 Vermeer works and in 1680 he married Madgdalene, daughter...
(1653–1695), whose estate sold it with other paintings by the artist in 1696. Records of that sale described The Milkmaid as "exceptionally good", and the work brought the second-highest price in the sale (175 guilder
Guilder
Guilder is the English translation of the Dutch gulden — from Old Dutch for 'golden'. The guilder originated as a gold coin but has been a common name for a silver or base metal coin for some centuries...
s, exceeded only by the 200 guilders paid for Vermeer's cityscape, View of Delft
View of Delft (Vermeer)
View of Delft is an oil painting by Johannes Vermeer. Painted ca. 1660-1661, the painting of the Dutch artist's hometown is among his most popular. Painted at a time when cityscapes were not commonplace, it is one of three known paintings of Delft by Vermeer, along with The Little Street and the...
).
In the 18th century, English painter and critic Joshua Reynolds
Joshua Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA was an influential 18th-century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy...
praised the work for its striking quality. In 1719, "the famous milkmaid, by Vermeer of Delft, artful", was auctioned and went through at least five Amsterdam collections before it became part of what The Metropolitan Museum of Art called "one of the great collectors of Dutch art", that of Lucretia Johanna van Winter (1785–1845). In 1822 she married into the Six family
Six family
Six is a Dutch well-known family from Amsterdam. The family originally comes from region of Lille in the North of France. During the Reformation, the family moved from Antwerp to Amsterdam and later belonged to the government of that city. Several family members were painted by Rembrandt. The name...
of collectors, and in 1908 her two sons sold the painting (as part of the famous Six collection of thirty-nine works) to the Rijksmuseum, which acquired the works with support from the Dutch government and the Rembrandt Society — but not before a good deal of public squabbling and the intervention of the States-General
States-General of the Netherlands
The States-General of the Netherlands is the bicameral legislature of the Netherlands, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The parliament meets in at the Binnenhof in The Hague. The archaic Dutch word "staten" originally related to the feudal classes in which medieval...
or Dutch parliament.
Exhibitions
The painting has been exhibited in western Europe and in the United States. In 1872 it was part of an Amsterdam exhibition of "old masters" ("Tentoonstelling van zeldzame en belangrijke schilderijen van oude meesters"), for Arti et Amicitiae, a society of visual artists and art lovers, and in 1900 it was part of an exhibition at Stedelijk MuseumStedelijk Museum
Founded in 1874, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is a museum for classic modern and contemporary art in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It has been housed on the Paulus Potterstraat, next to Museum Square Museumplein and to the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum and the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam Zuid...
in Amsterdam. Other European exhibits showing the work include the Royal Academy of Arts ("Exhibition of Dutch Art", London) in 1929; Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume
Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume
The Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume is a museum of contemporary art in the north-west corner of the Tuileries Gardens in Paris.The building was constructed in 1861 during the reign of Napoleon III...
("Exposition hollandaise: Tableaux, aqwuarelles et dessíns anciens et modernes", Paris) in 1921; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is the main art museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The museum began in 1847 with the collection of Frans Jacob Otto Boijmans . Much of the museum's original collection was destroyed in a disastrous 1864 fire...
("Vermeer, oorsprong en involoed: Frabritius, De Hooch, De Witte", Rotterdam) in 1935.
It was exhibited at the 1939 World's Fair
1939 New York World's Fair
The 1939–40 New York World's Fair, which covered the of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park , was the second largest American world's fair of all time, exceeded only by St. Louis's Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Many countries around the world participated in it, and over 44 million people...
in New York City, and the outbreak of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
during the fair – with the German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
occupation of the Netherlands – caused the work to remain in the U.S. until Holland was liberated. During this time it was displayed at the Detroit Institute of Arts
Detroit Institute of Arts
The Detroit Institute of Arts is a renowned art museum in the city of Detroit. In 2003, the DIA ranked as the second largest municipally owned museum in the United States, with an art collection valued at more than one billion dollars...
in Michigan
Michigan
Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....
(the museum where the curator of the World's Fair exhibit was working), and was included in that museum's exhibition catalogues in 1939 and 1941. During the war, the work was also displayed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was hanging as late as 1944, according to Leidtke. In 1953, the Kunsthaus Zurich
Kunsthaus Zürich
The Kunsthaus Zürich houses one of the most important art museums in Switzerland and Europe, collected by the local Kunstverein, called Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, and holdings running from the Middle Ages to contemporary art, with an emphasis on Swiss art.Kunsthaus is also the name of the tram stop...
displayed the painting in an exhibition, and the next year it traveled to Italy for an exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizione in Rome and the Palazzo Reale in Milan. In 1966, it was part of an exhibition at the Mauritshuis
Mauritshuis
The Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis is an art museum in The Hague, the Netherlands. Previously the residence of count John Maurice of Nassau, it now has a large art collection, including paintings by Dutch painters such as Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Steen, Paulus Potter and Frans...
in the Hague and the Musée de l'Orangerie
Musée de l'Orangerie
The Musée de l'Orangerie is an art gallery of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings located on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Though most famous for being the permanent home for eight Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet, the museum also contains works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse,...
in Paris. In 1999 and 2000 the painting was at the National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
in Washington for its exhibition "Johannes Vermeer: The Art of Painting", and it was part of the "Vermeer and the Delft School" exhibition at the National Gallery, London from June 20 to September 16, 2001 (it did not appear at the Metropolitan Museum of Art venue of that exhibition, earlier that year).
The painting returned to New York in 2009, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson
Henry Hudson
Henry Hudson was an English sea explorer and navigator in the early 17th century. Hudson made two attempts on behalf of English merchants to find a prospective Northeast Passage to Cathay via a route above the Arctic Circle...
's historic voyage (Amsterdam to Manhattan), where it was the central feature of a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, alongside several of the museum's five Vermeer works and other Dutch Golden Age painting
Dutch Golden Age painting
Dutch Golden Age painting is the painting of the Dutch Golden Age, a period in Dutch history generally spanning the 17th century, during and after the later part of the Eighty Years War for Dutch independence. The new Dutch Republic was the most prosperous nation in Europe, and led European trade,...
s.
Sources
- Bonafoux, Pascal. Vermeer. New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1992. ISBN 1-5682-2308-4
- Franits, Wayne, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, Yale UP, 2004, ISBN 0-300-10237-2
- Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the canon. Routledge, 1999. ISBN 0-415-06699-9
- Schama, SimonSimon SchamaSimon Michael Schama, CBE is a British historian and art historian. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain...
, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, 1987 - Wheelock, Arthur K. Vermeer: The Complete Works. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997. ISBN 0-8109-2751-9
External links
- Rijksmuseum page for this work
- 'Essential Vermeer' detailed, interactive analysis on 'The Milkmaid'
- "Special Exhibitions", portal pageWeb portalA web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....
on the 2009 Vermeer exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of ArtMetropolitan Museum of ArtThe Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
's official website - Recorded WNYC radio interview with Walter Liedtke, curator of a Vermeer exhibit, about the painting (18 minutes in length) (requires Adobe flashAdobe FlashAdobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast...
player)