Dutch iconography of maids

Painting detail showing the foot warmer, with tiles of Cupid and a man with a pole on either side of it; the clothes basket Vermeer removed from the painting was here. Also shown is a detail from the maid's brilliant blue apron.

The woman would have been known as a "kitchen maid" or maid-of-all-work rather than a specialised "milkmaid" at the time the painting was created: "milk maids" were women who milked cows; kitchen maids worked in kitchens.^[5] 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.^[6] Some of the paintings were slyly suggestive, like The Milkmaid, others more coarsely so.^[2]

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).^[2][7] 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.^[8]

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,^[3] although amorous symbols in this work still exemplify the tradition.^[5]

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.^[2] "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).^[7]

Gerrit Dou, Girl Chopping Onions

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^[2] or simply that while she is working she is daydreaming about a man.^[2] 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.^[5] 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.^[9]

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 which was never commonly recognized in America. Liedtke 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, "an exceedingly pretty lass ... 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.^[10]

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 connotation 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.

Narrative and thematic elements

According to art historian Harry Rand, the painting suggests the woman is making bread pudding, 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.^[3]

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.^[3]

"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."^[11]

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.^[2] 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 the viewer on the pouring of the milk.^[1]

The photograph-like realism of the painting resembles that of Leiden artists such as Dou, Frans van Mieris, and Gabriël Metsu.^[2] 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 might call 'tactile illusionism' to understand where he really wanted to go, which was in the more optical, light-filled direction."^[12]

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.^[2] 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."^[12]

"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."^[2]

Vermeer painted over two items originally in the painting. One was a large wall map (a Rijksmuseum web page calls it a painting)^[1] 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.)^[3] He originally placed a large, conspicuous clothes basket (the Rijksmuseum web page calls it a "sewing basket")^[1] 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.^[3]

"[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."^[11]

Technique and materials

This painting has "perhaps, the most brilliant color scheme of his oeuvre", according to the Essential Vermeer website. Already in the 18th century, English painter and critic Joshua Reynolds praised the work for its striking quality.^[3] One of the distinctions of Vermeer's palette, 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).^[3] 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.^[3]

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.^[9]

The discrepancy between objects at various distances from the viewer may indicate Vermeer used a camera obscura, according to Cant.^[9] 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.^[12]

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 the 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.^[9]

Monographs

• Bonafoux, Pascal, and Johannes Vermeer van Delft. Vermeer. New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1992. ISBN 978-1-568-52308-8 OCLC 249850444
• Cant, Serena, and Jan Vermeer van Delft. Vermeer and His World, 1632-1675. London: Quercus, 2009. ISBN 978-1-849-16005-6 OCLC 699202293
• Franits, Wayne E. The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-521-65330-5 OCLC 45284708
• Franits, Wayne E. Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-300-10237-6 OCLC 473754188
• Gaskell, Ivan, and Michiel Jonker. Vermeer Studies: [Proceedings of the Symposia "New Vermer Studies" Held in 1995 in Washington, and in 1996 in The Hague]. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998. Vol. 55. ISBN 978-0-300-07521-2 OCLC 631981597
• Gowing, Lawrence, and Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0-520-21276-3 OCLC 36857459
• Henderson, Jasper, Victor Schiferli, and Lynne Richards. Vermeer: The Life and Work of a Master. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2011. ISBN 978-9-086-89068-2 OCLC 763023437 - Translated from the Dutch from Lynne Richards.
• Koningsberger, Hans. The World of Vermeer, 1632-1675. Time-Life Library of Art series. Amsterdam: Time-Life Books, 1985. ISBN 978-0-900-65858-7 OCLC 13302281
• Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), and Liedtke, Walter A. The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer / Walter Liedtke. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009 OCLC 839735356
  • The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - 2009 exhibition catalogue
• Plomp, Michiel, et al. Vermeer and the Delft School / Walter Liedtke. New York : The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001. ISBN 978-0-870-99973-4 OCLC 819761194
  • Vermeer and the Delft School at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - 2001 exhibition catalog
• Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories. London: Routledge, 1999. ISBN 978-1-135-08440-0 OCLC 842262336
• Rand, Harry. 1998. "Wat maakte de 'Keukenmeid' van Vermeer?" Bulletin Van Het Rijksmuseum. 46, no. 2-3: 275-278. ISSN 0165-9510 OCLC 772557024
• Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Knopf, 1987. ISBN 978-0-394-51075-0 OCLC 14132010
• Vermeer, Johannes, and Taco Dibbits. Milkmaid by Vermeer and Dutch Genre Painting Masterworks from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam: Exhibition, The National Art Center, 26 September-17 December 2007. Tokyo: Tokyo Shimbun, 2007. OCLC 690709724 - 2007 exhibition catalog
• Wheelock, Arthur K. Vermeer & the Art of Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. ISBN 978-0-300-06239-7 OCLC 31409512
• Wheelock, Arthur K., and Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer: The Complete Works. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1997. ISBN 978-0-810-92751-3 OCLC 36178954

Multimedia

• Liedtke, Walter. Special Exhibition: Vermeer’s Masterpiece, The Milkmaid on Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid exhibit (September 10, 2009 – November 29, 2009). Audio. Includes transcript.
• Liedtke, Walter. Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid: Discreet Object of Desire: A Curatorial Talk by Walter Liedtke, Curator, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. September 26, 2009. Video. (72 min)
• Lopate, Leonard. Vermeer's The Milkmaid, The Leonard Lopate Show. WNYC. September 18, 2009. Audio interview with Walter Liedtke, curator of a Vermeer exhibit. (18 min)