The Milkmaid

critical excerpt

c. 1658-1660
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. (Vermeer: The Complete Works , New York, 1997)

c. 1657-1658
Walter Liedtke (Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)

The closed, plain-weave linen still has its original tacking edges. The thread count is 14 x 14.5" per cm². The canvas was relined with wax/resin in 1950 over an existing paste lining.

The ground is a pale brown/gray, containing chalk, lead white, and umber. Apart from a strip above the milkmaid's head along the upper edge of the painting, there is a dark underpainting in the background. Infrared reflectography shows broad , black undermodeling in the shadows of the blue apron. A pinhole with which Vermeer marked the vanishing point of the composition is visible in the paint layer above the right hand of the maid.

A red lake glaze is used as an underpaint in the flesh color of the maid's right hand. It is followed by an ocher layer in the shadows, and a white layer followed by a pink layer in the highlights. Several areas were painted wet-in-wet: the glazing bars, the maid's white cap and the details or her yellow bodice. The still life is richly textured with a combination of glazing, crumbling and thick impasto. The bright blue edge to the maid's skirt is created by the luminosity of the underlying white layer.

* Johannes Vermeer (exh. cat., National Gallery of Art and Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis - Washington and the Hague, 1995, edited by Arthur Wheelock)

literature

exhibitions

Still-life with Glass, Cheese, Butter and Cake
Floris Gerritsz. van Schooten
Private collection

It is well known that Holland, and particularly its women, had an international reputation for cleanliness. Between 1500 and 1800 numerous travelers reported the habit of housewives and maids who meticulously cleansed the interior and exterior of their housesholds. Historians Bas van Bavel and Oscar Gelderblomt have argued that "it was the commercialization of dairy farming that led to improvements in household hygiene. In the 14th century, peasants but also urban dwellers began to produce large quantities of butter and cheese for the market. In their small production units the wives and daughters worked to secure a clean environment for proper curdling and churning." The two historians have estimated that at the turn of the 16th century half of all rural households and up to one third of urban households in Holland produced butter and cheese.

Cleanliness is of paramount importance for the production of butter and cheese. Cows have to be milked with proper care to prevent the transmission of diseases between them. Small farmers may have to save up raw milk for several days before they can start dairying. Without the use of modern equipment the production of butter and cheese requires several days.

A German professor of veterinary medicine noted that cleanliness in stables was very important for dairying which explained why Dutch butter was so much better than German butter. Dutch milkmaids were noted for their hygiene and speed with which they churned. Presumably, such good care would be able to produce butter of equal quality and the higher price this fetched would compensate for their extra efforts.

Viewers' eyes have always been mesmerized by the glistening stream of white liquid issuing from the pitcher in Vermeer's Milkmaid. Although it is not possible to understand exactly what the maid is making, there can be no doubt that it is milk that issues from her earthenware jug. But milk was rarely drunk in urban areas because it was likely to spoil before it could be consumed. Cheese or butter would have required a butter churn and a large copper kettle occasionally seen in Dutch genre works.

Although northern Netherlands' soil proved too wet for large-scale wheat farming, the Baltic grain trade allowed the nation ample access to this staple crop. By the 17th century, the Dutch virtually controlled wheat and rye production in Poland, East Prussia, Swedish Pomerania and Livonia. Silos in the Dutch cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Middelburg stored large grain surpluses, thereby safeguarding against price fluctuation and bread shortage. As a result of these and other government-enforced measures, the Dutch enjoyed greater food stability than their counterparts throughout much of 17th-century Europe.

At least two meals per day in a typical Dutch household included sliced bread, usually topped with butter or cheese. The more affluent enjoyed herenbrood—"whitev bread made from wheat flour—on a regular basis, while the less prosperous typically depended on semelbrood, "black," rye-kernel bread, for their daily starch. During times of extreme food scarcity, some peasants turned to bread made from ground chestnut meal.

By the end of his life, Vermeer had accumulated and enormous debt to one of Delft's principle bakers, Hendrick Van Buyten who was an occasional collector of the Vermeer's paintings. Van Buyten once showed the French French aristocrat Balthasar de Monconys some works by Vermeer, one of which he estimated as being worth was 600 livers. After the artist's death, Van Buyten received two more paintings from Vermeer's wife Catharina Bolnes as a security for the debt for bread of more than 600 guilders.

The economist and art historian John M. Montias reckons that this sum covered about 8,000 pounds of white bread at the prices of the time, roughly three years' worth of supplies for a household of that size. When Vermeer died, he left his wife with 11 children

Lady at her Toilette (detail)
Gerard ter Borch
1660
Institute of Arts, Detroit

Unfortunately, first person descriptions of Dutch women, whether they come in the form of books, letters or diaries, are rare. The only autobiography of note was written by Anna Maria van Schurman, an extraordinary, highly educated woman who excelled in the visual art, music, and literature, was proficient in 14 languages. Otherwise, we know little how real Dutch women acted.

We know quite well, at least that in theory, how Dutch women were expected behave themselves. Conduct books, which along with manuals and child rearing and other moralistic writings which abounded and were only less popular than the Bible, speak loud and clear. First and foremost, women were expected to fulfill themselves entirely through marriage, childrearing and house keeping. The home was the appointed place for the woman. And it was also the safest place, for there she could not succumb to temptation. Domestic virtue was seen not only the prime regulator of interpersonal male/female relationships, but one of the keys to stability and prosperity of the Dutch nation itself. Perhaps no other painting of the Golden Age conveys so convincingly this quintessential value more than Vermeer's Milkmaid, if not the more discreet Lacemaker.

But the daily lives for women must not have blindly live up to the strict guidelines laid down by the moralists and in a surprising number of eyewitness accounts, especially those of foreign visitors, we encounter a and entirely different kind of women especially outside the domestic setting.

When Vermeer began to produce his genre paintings in the late 1650s he could not have embarked upon a career in at a more propitious moment. The Dutch economy virtually exploded with the cessation of hostilities with Spain in 1648; indeed, the nation's economy would reach its apogee within a few short years after that event.

After a first few attempts at history painting in the mid 1650s, Vermeer abruptly changed course and devoted his full attentions to his now-famous genre interiors, a form of art which had been pioneered by Dutch painters some decades before.

Although popular conception has it that genre pictures constitute essential slices, or "snapshots" of daily life, in reality they portray only a small portion of daily experience in Dutch living. For example, people engaged in intellectual or entertaining activities far outnumber people shown at work. Notwithstanding the long and cruel wars which the Dutch were constantly forced to wage to preserve their independence and prosperity, very few actual battle scenes were painted. Soldiers were preponderantly depicted in fancy military costume as they engage such harmless activities as card-playing or mercenary lovemaking. And while innumerable ships and marinescapes testify the Dutch dependence on maritime trade, the seamen are usually depicted with a few adroit dabs of paint as they scuttle about the complex riggings and naval fixtures. They are almost never shown close up working at any specific task or given a face.

Although the widespread distribution of paintings in the Netherlands may have been exaggerated by contemporary accounts, a large swath of the population could indeed afford at least a painting or two. In an age when the average working class wages amounted to approximately 500 to 700 guilders, a good quality genre painting might be had for 10 guilders or even less. One tronie (a single head) by Vermeer bought by a Danish sculptor was esteemed 10 guilders although his more complex works must have reached much higher sums. A well-to-do Delft baker once reported that his single-figured works was worth the astounding sum of 600 guilders.

Amoris divini emblemata (titlepage)
Otto van Veen
1615

It is now believed that Vermeer drew inspiration from a wide source of visual and literary sources including emblem books. Historians have pursued complicated connections between genre paintings and emblem books of the period although no definitive interpretive key has been found.

Since emblem books were published in a variety of forms—from expensive leather-bound editions to cheaply made copies—they were affordable to most Netherlanders. Moreover, since the nation enjoyed particularly high literacy rates during the 17th century, even members of lower socio-economic classes likely possessed the ability to read. Widely accessible in these ways, Scholar Christopher Brown calls emblem books a "truly popular" form of literature, and argues that artists might likely have communicated to viewers by referencing the popular rhymes. Importantly, however, this way of viewing Golden Age genre painting often falters when items with conflicting or unrelated associations appear in the same work.

X-ray imagery demonstrates that the slight shift in tone (pentimento) behind the milkmaid's red skirt indicates the presence of a large conspicuous clothes basket, later painted over by Vermeer. This was not the only time that Vermeer simplified his compositions by removing larges scale objects from the picture. In the Woman Reading by an Open Window a dark framed Cupid once was hung directly behind the girl and in the Maid Asleep, a dog once stood in the open doorway and a cavalier stood in the see-through room. Some critics believe they may have been removed in order to bring into precise focus the works' iconographic significance.

A Young Maid Servant
Michael Sweerts
c. 1660
Findation Aetas Aurea Vaduz
Liechtenstien

None of the sitters, including the young woman who poses in the Milkmaid, has ever been identified even thought there persists a romantic propension to associate her with a maid of the Vermeer household, Tanneke Everpoel. Whether she be Tanneke or not, the painting was certainly not intended as a portrait.

In Dutch emblematic and popular literature maids were often represented in their subservient role and as a threat to the honor and security of the home, the center of Dutch life, being considered the most dangerous women of all. However, some of Vermeer's contemporaries like Pieter de Hooch began to represent them in a more neutral role. Certainly, Vermeer's empathetic and dignified interpretation of this maid stands virtually alone if not for a few pictures by Michael Sweerts who had a predilection for painting characters who rarely appeared in formal portraits of the time. Sweerts'Young Maid Servant (see left) is a rare example of a dignified treatement of a specific individual from the lower class of Dutch society.

This small painting has been renowned throughout its history. Twenty years after Vermeer's death it was auctioned with 20 other works by the artist for the sum of 175 guilders while the much larger View of Delft, always highly considered as well, went for 200 guilders. The title given to the painting in 1719 already speaks volumes: "The famous Milkmaid, by Vermeer of Delft, artful." Later, English painter and critic Joshua Reynolds praised the striking quality of the work. The painting passed through a number of noted collections until it was purchased for the Rijksmuseum in 1908 along with 39 paintings from the famous Six Collection after much public squabbling and the intervention of the parliament.

Vermeer, like his contemporaries, possessed a very limited number of pigments when compared to those of the modern artist. Throughout his career, he seemed to have employed no more than 20 different pigments. The only difference in Vermeer's palette in respects to his contemporaries was his preference for the costly natural ultramarine, made of crushed lapis lazuli. Other painters used the more common and much cheaper azurite. Although the Milkmaid bears much in common with the technique of the preceding Officer and Laughing Girl, in it we find, perhaps, the most brilliant color scheme of his oeuvre.

Lead-tin, yellow and natural ultramarine are used full force although strong local color cannot in itself account the exceptional luminosity of this work. It still has not been explained why the artist passed in space of just two works from a somber and rather conventional rendering of light of the early paintings to a startling power of the Milkmaid. In any case, artists in Vermeer's time usually set out their palettes differently each day with only those few pigment necessary for the day's work. In fact, once a monochrome underpainting was worked up sufficiently that served to define basic forms and lighting, each are of color was worked up piecemeal one at a time.

The humble walls illuminated by daylight of different intensities, present one of the most challenging pictorial problems in Vermeer's oeuvre. When similar representations of walls by contemporaries are compared to Vermeer's, one cannot help but note the various tones of gray pigment used. Instead, in Vermeer's renderings, these same or similar tones, appear inseparable from the play of light as it rakes across the uneven texture of the plastered surface. Surprisingly, the palette Vermeer employed was simple as it is effective: white lead, umber and charcoal black. This simple formula for painting white objects was widely known but among contemporary genre painters perhaps no artist more than Vermeer was able to use it so effectively. The lime-plastered walls were not only appreciated for their aesthetic qualities, but for their hygienic function which was necessary for the production of cheese and beer. The Dutch were known for their cleanliness then as today and Delft, where Vermeer lived and worked all his life, was the cleanest town of all. Foreigners often laugh when they are told that the earlier Dutch term schoon stands for both "beautiful" and "clean."

The Shoemaker's Shop (detail)
Quiringh Gerritsz. van Brekelenkam
59.4 x 82.6 cm
Norton Simon Art Foundation

From the outset of his career, Vermeer spared no pains to achieve the most powerful, communicative image possible making scores of major and minor alterations in the composition during the course of the painting process. It may come as a surprise that in the present work, whose design is so stark and so solid as to seem inevitable, was achieved after considerable reworking. In fact, two large objects which were part of the original composition and would have given the work a completely different visual aspect, were painted out by Vermeer himself. In the lower left behind the maid's skirt, there once stood a large, open clothes basket with laundry issuing from it. But even more surprisingly was a large wall map which enclosed the upper part of the milkmaid's body.

This is not the only map that Vermeer removed form one of his compositions. However, even if he had chosen to retain the map in the Milkmaid, it is truly difficult to imagine that he had intended to invest it with other than aesthetic aims.

The diffusion of printed geographical maps is testified by both the frequency and the remarkable variety of settings in which they are represented in Dutch genre interior painting. Although they might appear out of place in the rustic kitchen, an overview of Dutch interior paintings shows that they were almost ubiquitous, from the lowly, working-class environment to the most refined interiors of 17th-century Netherlands.

Such decorative large-scale maps were printed in numerous editions and offered an effective yet cheap way to decorating bare white wall. In reality, were these maps were a result of highly sophisticated production methods which necessitated thorough knowledge in fields as diverse as surveying, drawing, etching, printing and merchandising.

A Kitchen
Hendrick Sorgh
ca. 1643
52.1 x 44.1 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In order to most appreciate the exceptional quality of this canvas which has a remarkable impact on anyone who has the fortune to see it, we must decipher Vermeer's full intentions. Oddly, even though Vermeer's Milkmaid has been scrutinized from head to toe, art historians have left the question of what she is doing blank. Obviously, she pours milk and does so in a particularly thoughtful way, but for what reason? Art historian Harry Rand addressed the question in great detail and his theory is reported below.

First of all, the woman Vermeer depicts is not the home's owner, she is a common servant, not to be confused with the other servants called "kameneir" who attended the personal needs of upper-class women and functioned contemporarily as a sort of guardians of their mistress.

Vermeer's unassuming maid is slowly pouring milk into a squat earthenware vessel which is commonly known as a Dutch oven. The deep recessed rim shows the vessel was meant to hold a lid to seal the contents for airtight baking. Dutch ovens characteristically were used for prolonged, slow cooking and were made of iron or in the case of the present painting, of ceramic. Rand posits that the key to the contents are the broken pieces of bread which lays before her in the still life and assumes that she has already made custard in which the bread mixed with egg is now soaking. She now pours milk over the mixture to cover it because if the bread is not simmering in liquid while it is baking, the upper rusts of the bread will turn unappetizingly dry instead of forming the delicious upper surface of the pudding. The maid takes such care in pouring the trickle of milk because it is difficult to rescue bread pudding if the ingredients are not correctly measured and combined.

The foot warmer with its smoldering ember on the floor below, reinforces Rand's hypothesis. The maid's kitchen is not properly heated. In the best well-to-do houses, two kitchens were often found, one "hot" for daily cooking of meats, breads etc., and another "cold" reserved for baking, confectionary, pastries. The cold kitchen did cause the -important butter to melt and allowed the cook time to fold it in to dough or crusts.

Thus, Vermeer describes not just a visual account of a common scene, but a ethical and social value. He represents the precise moment in which the household maid is attentively working with common cooking ingredients and formerly unusable stale bread transforming them into a new, wholesome and enjoyable product. 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.