The Complete Interactive Vermeer Catalogue

A simple window

This rustic window, presumably the same one in the earlier Officer and Laughing Girl, differs in structure and rendering from those more complicated which populate Vermeer's later pictures. Minor incidents of light and texture, such as a broken piece of one of the panes, are registered with utmost precision and pictorial vigor. In Vermeer's later works, the windows become so geometrically stylized that in some cases they seem abstract works of art in themselves.

Compositional dynamics

Critics have always noted that almost every compositional element in Vermeer's works is determined with the utmost care to direct the spectator's eye to the points of thematic interest and create an indivisible expressive unit. The cascade of the black frame, the basket and the brass marketing all lead the eye down towards the thematic center of the painting: the pouring milk. At the same time, each of these three objects preserves its distinct form and texture, which are immediately distinguishable. The critic Edward Snow wrote that The Milkmaid "is a melody of contrasting textures. The pair of hanging baskets provide the key: rough and smooth, hard and soft, woven and molded, curved and angular, open and shut." Consider especially the shifting interplay of organic and manufactured forms (the bread and milk against the containers and the table; the wicker basket against the metal one..." In any case, even though there are many different objects in the painting, a sense of benign order reigns throughout.

The basket, presumably, held bread, the lifeline of any Dutch family. Curiously, when Vermeer died he owed the considerable sum of 617 guilders to the baker and occasional painting client, Hendrick van Buyten. This debt was probably not unusual for the time. After the painter's untimely death, his widow, Catharina Bolnes, turned over two paintings as collateral, a rather generous gesture on the part of the baker.

The wicker bread basket was hung high on the wall away from mice. The copper pail immediately below, called a marktemmer, had a long handle so it could be conformable slung of the shoulder when shopping at the outdoor market. Similar pails appear in many of Dutch interior paintings of the time although Vermeer's is smaller and more finely decorated than most.

The Dutch footwarmer

In many Dutch homes, one would have stumbled across a foot warmer or foot stove (stoof or stoofje in Dutch), a little wooden box with a perforated top and sometimes perforated sides. Inside these curious objects was a receptacle of pottery or metal filled with hot coals that served to keep one's lower parts warm during the long, gelid Dutch winter, a necessity particularly in damp, poorly heated houses with stone or brick floors. They would have only been found in middle-class homes. While the one featured in Vermeer's Milkmaid is a simple affair, some footwarmers were decorated with elaborate carving, which commemorates family ties, religious beliefs or national preoccupations. Curiously the base was often as elaborately carved like the other sides because when they were not in use foot warmers were hung from a ceiling beam to save space. They appear an infinite number of times in Dutch interior paintings. The types of footwarmesrs used by the Dutch were also common in northern Germany.

Althoug Vermeer may have depicted the foot warmer as an incidental slice of daily life, he may have intended to convey some symbolic meaning. In emblematic literature of the day, footwarmers were sometimes associated with a lover's desire for constancy and caring, an idea reinforced by the cupid images on the tiles directly behind it. As Walter Liedtke pointed out, it may allude to the maid's inner warmth or even have a sexual implication since the warmth of the coals moved upwards under the skirt towards the lady's private parts.

"Mignon des Dames" from Sinnepoppen
Roemer Visscher
1614
Engraving
Universiteits-Bibliotheek, Amsterdam

The foot warmer motif appears in the famous emblem book Sinnepoppen by Roemer Visscher in which a stove with a firepan is called a Mignon des Dames: "Love of the Ladies." In winter, reads the text, women love their warm stoves more than anything else. And if a man comes along, though he may do his utmost, he can at best take second place.

Emblem books were a favorite genre in the 16th ans 17th centuries. They displayed an illustration, an aphorism, and an explanation (usually in rhyme) on every page. No single element of this triad could be understood without the other two. In 1612, several of Visscher's poems were printed in Leiden without his knowledge. In reply he commissioned the Amsterdam publisher Willem Jansz Blaeu, especially famous for his atlases, to publish his Sinnepoppen.

In the first two decades of the 17th century the house of Visscher on Geldersekade, Amsterdam, was a meeting point for the Amsterdam cultural elite. The Dutch poet Vondel referred to the blessed Roemer's house" as a place: "Whose floor is daily trod, whose threshold e'en worn bare By painters, artists, poets, by singers everywhere."

A humble nail

This nail—another large nail is above the hanging bread basket—presumably held a framed painting or decorative map. It casts a small shadow on the plaster to the right, signaling the light originates from the left. To the right of the figure's head appear a few nail holes. Until around 1600, wrought handmade nails ("wrought" means beaten into shape by hammer blows rather than cast in its final shape by pouring liquid iron into a mold), nails one by one was one of the blacksmith's many jobs. To make nails the blacksmith first made a square iron rod, to for the nails' so-called shank. Heated in a forge, the rod would be hammered on all four sides to form a point. The pointed nail rod was then reheated and cut off. Then, each nail was forced into a hole in a nail header or anvil and beaten with several glancing blows of the hammer to form the nail's head. One of the most common types of nail head was convex hammer-rounded "rose," made with four or five hammer blows. Being made by hand, nails were relatively scarce and expensive. Nails were so valuable in the early American settlements that in 1646 the Virginia legislature had to pass a measure to prevent colonists from burning down their old houses to reclaim the nails when they moved. Nails provide one of the best clues to help determine the age of historic buildings.

The model: Vermeer's wife Catarina?

The extraordinary tactility of this picture is particularly evident in the modeling of the woman's head and bodice. Small touches of paint—white, light ocher, reddish-brown, brown, greenish-gray—coalesce magically in the form of a solid head. Brushstrokes, albeit tiny, are boldly juxtaposed with little or no blending. The buildup of paint is so pronounced that one has the impression that Vermeer was attempting to sculpt rather than paint the head.

Critics have frequently speculated that the model for this painting was Tanneke Everpoel, Vermeer's family maid. Through archival documents of 1663, we know something of her temperament. She had once defended Vermeer's wife Catharina from an attack by her lone and wild-tempered brother, Willem Bolnes, which had occurred some years earlier.

The events were recorded in a notary public deposition of several people, Willem de Coorde, Gerrit Cornelisz., stone carver and Tanneke herself who testified concerning Willem's abusive character. Tanneke and Gerrit the stone carver testified: "That on various occasions Willem Bolnes had created a violent commotion in the house—to such an extent that many people gathered before the door—as he swore at his mother, calling her an old popish swine, a she-devil, and other such ugly swear words that, for the sake of decency, must be passed over. She, Tanneke, also saw them Bolnes had pulled a knife and tried to wound his mother with it. She declared further that Maria Thins had suffered so much violence from her son that she dared not go out of her room and was forced to have her food and drink brought the. Also that Bolnes committed similar violence from time to time against the daughter of Maria's, the wife of Johannes Vermeer, threatening to beat her on diverse occasions with a stick, notwithstanding the fact that she was pregnant to the last degree."

Luckily, on this occasion Tanneke was able to prevent some of this violence herself. Moreover, De Coorde declared that on several occasions, warned by Tanneke, Willem had blocked Bolnes from entering the house: "He also had seen Willem several times thrust at his sister with a stick at the end of which there was an iron pin."

Vermeer's mother-in-law, Maria Thins, eventually succeeded in having Willem committed to a house of correction. Many specialists had drawn attention to the fact that the crude domestic violence which plagued the Vermeer household never once found its way into the artist's peaceful compositions.

The maid's yellow bodice

The milkmaid is dressed in various layers of clothes. She wears a sturdy, leather yellow chamois top with rough, reddish stitching and a blue apron over a heavy red wool skirt, suggesting that the picture was painted in the winter.

The chamois is modeled much with the same technique as the maid's down-turned face and the still life, composed of an interminable series of briskly applied dabs of thick yellow and brown paint, a technique which imitates the rough texture of the garment itself. The yellow pigment used to depict it has been identified as lead-tin yellow, the brightest yellow pigment available in Vermeer's time. The same pigment is to be employed in later representations of the famous fur-trimmed morning jackets adorned by elegant women.

After the Milkmaid, Vermeer never again turned his attention to a working-class theme.

The maid's "mess sleeves"

Woman with a Child in a Pantry (detail)
Pieter de Hooch
c. 1656–1660
Oil on canvas, 65 x 60.5 cm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

18th-century diagram of morsmouwen

These curious green and blue work sleeves are called morsmouwen, or "mess sleeves." Made of wool or heavy silk, they are not a part of the yellow bodice but are worn separately to protect against staining. They can be occasionaly observed in the works of other painters, such as Pieter de Hooch's Woman with a Child in a Pantry (image above left)

In this detail, Vermeer displays his ability to create very different colored draperies from a limited palette. First, the sleeves were modeled in shades of monochrome brown defining the meandering folds with chiaroscural values. The lightest areas were accentuated with a pale admixture of white and ultramarine blue. Once dry, the outer parts were glazed with a transparent yellow creating a greenish tint. The turned-up, underparts remained unglazed.

The earthen pot and a bit of milk

Whatever symbolic or practical meaning Vermeer had wished to assign to the milk which falls into the stoneware receptacle below, it is the focal point of the painting as well as the maid's attention. It has been pointed out that the artist chose not to depict the milk inside the jug, which, instead, would have been visible given that the artist's viewpoint was above the lower lip of the jug.

The two-handled bowl and pitcher are examples of redware, which in this period was mostly produced in the town of Oosterhout in North Brabant. The pot served for prolonged cooking. Stoneware was made of clay that produces a gray or brown color when it is fired at a temperature of around 1250 degrees Celsius. It is exceptionally hard and only slightly porous. Moreover, stoneware does not acquire a taste and is easy to clean. It is an ideal material in which to preserve liquids and from which to drink. Around 1300, stoneware acquired something of a mass market and remained popular until glass and Delftware took its place in the 17th century.

In order to intensify the rich, brick color of the stoneware vessels, the artist applied dabs of light blue here and there where one might expect to find reflections, a technique unusual for the time when objects were described strictly with their local colors and anonymously colored dark shadows.

Picturing light & Westerwald pottery

More ink has flowed to describe the poetic and optical qualities of this still life than perhaps for any other detail in Vermeer's oeuvre. The bread, basket, pitcher and bowl display such vibrancy and tactility that they effectively vie with the woman as the focus of the painting.

To achieve the extraordinary luminosity which emanates from this work, Vermeer reconstructs, rather than represents, the activity of light with a complex layering of paint. Thick impasto paint is used to render the rough textures of the objects, while thin glazes nuance local color and deepen shadows. The famous pointillés, or spherical dabs of thick opaque paint clearly evident in this detail, suggest nothing more than light as it flickers off the fractured topography of the bread, stoneware and basket. Their presence suggests that the artist used a camera obscura as an aid to the painting process.

The studded beer jug with a pewter lid was most likely manufactured in the Westerwald region of Rhineland in the southeast part of the Netherlands.

Pottery production in the Westerwald region is known from the beginning of the 15th century, but an influx of migrant potters from Siegburg and Raeren helped establish the stoneware industry towards the end of the 16th century. The industry grew in the 17th century and remained strong well into the 18th and 19th centuries, with exports not only to Britain but also Australasia, Africa and America. Westerwald stoneware displays colors that range from light to mid-grey with their surfaces usually treated with a salt glaze, giving the characteristic "orange peel" effect, with the addition of cobalt blue and manganese purple painted details. These two colors were the only ones capable of withstanding the high-firing temperatures of the stoneware kilns.

A workday apron painted with precious natural ultramarine

The dark blue apron and the similarly colored cloth that drapes from the table possess a stunning inner luster that cannot be adequately captured in reproduction. To achieve this effect, Vermeer applied one or two thick transparent layer(s) of the costly natural ultramarine (made of crushed lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan) over a vigorously defined monochrome underpainting, most likely executed in strongly contrasting shades black and white, a standard practice since oil painting was invented.

The transparent layer of paint, called a glaze, produces an effect analogous to that of stained glass. For painting blue objects contemporary painters, instead, usually employed the cheaper blue called azurite which, however, does not possess the depth or the prized purplish undertone of true ultramarine. Some scholars have speculated that it was Vermeer's rich Delft patron Pieter van Ruijven who supplied the artist with such costly pigment seeing that only a few years before The Milkmaid was painted the young Vermeer did not have enough money to pay in full the entrance fee to the Saint Luke Guild, the trade organization of Delft's artists and artisans.

The costume historian Marieke de Winkel explained that the aprons were worn by maids—unlike the white aprons worn by ladies of the house-were often dark blue to mask stains. Blue aprons are seen on the servants in Vermeer's Mistress and Maid and in A Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid.

The green tablecloth

Although it cannot be fully appreciated in many reproductions, the green tablecloth, which literally glows in the original, mediates between the lustrous blue of the maid's wrap and the yellow warmth of the basket and bread.

Delft hand-painted tiles

The decorated white tiles, seen in more than one work by Vermeer, were made in Delft and were used for covering the lower areas of inside walls and the inside of the hearth. They hid the damp spots on the ground-floor walls and provided a skirting that protected the plaster from the daily assault of brooms and mops. Such tiles were little works of art in their own right and often displayed games of children, Cupids and other amusing themes which Vermeer utilized to tell part of the story of his paintings. The refined and world-renowned Delftware was produced only in the later years of Vermeer's life. Delft porcelain, which initially imitated Chinese imports for local use, became so desirable that it was soon exported not only to Flanders, France England and Spain, but to the West Indies as well.

One of the tiles which Vermeer added displays a fairly recognizable Cupid with a cocked bow trapped midway between the milkmaid's voluminous skirt and the footwarmer. Two leading scholars, Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Walter Liedtke, have favored amorous interpretations of this minuscule detail. However, since no period text documents that genre painters availed themselves of such symbolic refineries, some scholars remain skeptical. For example, Taco Dibbits observed that similar Cupids were found on tiles all over Dutch houses, and that the Cupids presence may be merely coincidental and that in the present context need not mean anything very much at all.

The Dutch maid

From the point of view of the 21st-century observer, it is hard to imagine a more wholesome image than Vermeer's Milkmaid. In Vermeer's time, instead, the handsome young milkmaid may, as Walter Liedtke has recently written, have been seen as "a discreet object of desire." Liedtke relates that 17th-century Dutch viewers, like Vermeer's patron Pieter van Ruijven, were "well acquainted with the reputation of kitchen maids and especially milkmaid, who were known for their sexual availability." Liedtke cites examples of Netherlandish prints which propagate this common opinion.

Although the theme of the "available" milkmaid was largely domesticated in the works of the Leiden painters of the fijnschilder school, Vermeer nonetheless knew he could count on its familiarity when he contrasted the rough leather sleeves with the fleshy nudity of her exposed forearm, which as Liedtke puts it, "is frankly alluring in its own way."

In any case, the figure pouring milk in Vermeer's painting is not actually a milkmaid, but more properly, a kitchen maid.

The maid's mess sleeves

Woman with a Child in a Pantry (detail)
Pieter de Hooch
c. 1656–1660
Oil on canvas, 65 x 60.5 cm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

18th-century diagram of morsmouwen

These curious green and blue work sleeves are called morsmouwen, or "mess sleeves." Made of wool or heavy silk, they are not a part of the yellow bodice but are worn separately to protect against staining. They can be occassionaly observed in work of other painters, such as Pieter de Hooch's Woman with a Child in a Pantry (image above left)

In this detail Vermeer displays his ability to create very different colored draperies from a limited palette. First, the sleeves were modeled in shades of monochrome brown defining the meanering folds with chiaroscural values. The lightest areas were accentuated with a pale admixture of white and ultramarine blue. Once dry, the outer parts were glazed with a transparent yellow creating a greenish tint. The turned-up, under parts remained unglazed.

The red petticoat

Such red petticoats are commonly pictured in Dutch interior paintings. The popularity of this garment is testified by the fact that they were worn by both ladies of the household and maids. Since seventeenth-century painters lacked a deep red of the kind shown in the paintings, red objects were first modeled in shades of vermilion, a popular orange-toned pigment, and black for the deepest shadows. When dry, the whole passage was glazed with a thin layer of a highly transparent pigment called red madder. The layer of madder not only deepened the vermilion without hiding the tonal contrasts but protected it from turning black. Given its vibrant depth, Vermeer must have layered this passage with more than one glaze of madder.

Vermilion (mercuric sulfide), also known as cinnabar, was found in all mineral extraction localities that yield mercury, notably Almadén (Spain). This mine was exploited from Roman times until 1991 and continued for centuries to be the most important cinnabar deposit in the world. Vermilion's notorious tendency for turning black over time was well known and is painfully evident in works ranging from ancient Roman frescoes to the baroque paintings by Peter Paul Rubens. Although this defect was previously unexplained, researchers have shown that the culprit is the elemental mercury. The chemist Katrien Keune, showed that the compound can be broken down through a series of chemical reactions initiated by chlorine ions—which are especially abundant in the air near the sea—together with light.

Painting white-washed walls

Although rarely discussed, the prosaic white-washed wall which set the stage for the artist's quiet little dramas are crucial components of Vermeer's interiors. These walls not only mark the furthest limits of pictures' implied three-dimensional space but silently orchestrate the mood of each scene and establish the broader scheme of illumination by which the chiaroscural and chromatic relationships of the architectural features, figures and movable objects can be appropriately gauged.

A Merry Company (detail)
Anthonie Palamedes
1633
Oil on panel, 61 x 89 cm
. Hallwyl Museum, Stockholm

In oil painting, the naturalistic rendering of a brightly lit wall, such as those found in the Delft works of Pieter de Hooch, Antonie Palamedesz. or Vermeer, is a challenging undertaking. However, while Vermeer's colleagues depicted walls in a fairly summary and standardized manner, attentive examination shows that Vermeer experimented with a more refined and broader range of techniques just as he had done with others of his preferred motifs (e.g. leaded windows, floor tiles, wall maps etc.). Vermeer's exceptional powers of observation and pictorial synthesis allowed him capture nuances of light, shade and texture in his walls that his colleagues either ignored or were unable to represent.

In Vermeer's walls, the broader left-to right chiaroscural variation immediately establishes the direction and intensity of the incoming light and how it gradually diminishes as it flows obliquely over its surface. Nail holes, cracks, crevices and other minor surface irregularities are recorded with discreet variations in the paint's tonal values. In some works, such details are "literally" depicted with darker and lighter paint, in others by digging the stiff-bristled brush into the wet, light-toned paint exposing here and there the underlying darker ground. Sometimes paint is used metaphorically. By piling up thick paint impasto in the lighter areas of the wall, the painter evoked not only the strength of the light which illuminates its surface but their crusty texture produced by repeated coatings of lime that were necessary to maintain the walls clean, fully reflective and hygienic. Minor cast shadows, instead, were often painted with thin, semi-transparent layers of darker paint in order to suggest their insubstantial nature. The contours, tones and shapes of the shadows cast by the widows, painting-within-paintings, maps etc. provide more precise information about the intensity and direction of the light as well as information about the morphological characteristics of the objects which cast them.

Painting White-Washed Walls

Although rarely discussed, the prosaic white-washed walls that set the stage for the artist's quiet little dramas are crucial components of Vermeer's interiors. These walls not only mark the furthest limits of picture's implied three-dimensional space but silently orchestrate the mood of each scene and establish the broader scheme of illumination by which the chiaroscural and chromatic relationships of the architectural features, figures and movable objects can be appropriately gauged.

In oil painting, the naturalistic rendering of a brightly lit wall, such as those found in the Delft works of Pieter de Hooch, Antonie Palamedesz. or Vermeer, is a challenging undertaking. However, while Vermeer's colleagues depicted walls in a fairly summary and standardized manner, attentive examination shows that Vermeer experimented with a more refined and broader range of techniques just as he had done with others of his preferred motifs (e.g. leaded windows, floor tiles, wall maps etc.). Vermeer's exceptional powers of observation and pictorial synthesis allowed him to capture nuances of light, shade and texture in his walls that his colleagues either ignored or was unable to represent.

In Vermeer's walls, the broader left-to-right chiaroscural variation immediately establishes the direction and intensity of the incoming light and how it gradually diminishes as it flows obliquely over its surface. Nail holes, cracks, crevices and other minor surface irregularities are recorded with discreet variations in the paint's tonal values. In some works, such details are "literally" depicted with darker and lighter paint, in others by digging the stiff-bristled brush into the wet, light-toned paint exposing here and there the underlying darker ground. Sometimes paint is used metaphorically. By piling up thick paint impasto in the lighter areas of the wall, the painter evoked not only the strength of the light which illuminates its surface but their crusty texture produced by repeated coating of lime which necessary to maintain the walls clean, fully reflective and hygienic. Minor cast shadows, instead, were often painted with thin, semi-transparent layers of darker paint in order to suggest their insubstantial nature. The contours, tones and shapes of the shadows cast by the widows, painting-within-paintings, maps etc. provide more precise information about the intensity and direction of the light as well as information about the morphological characteristics of the objects which cast them.

The rustic floor

In keeping with the humble kitchen setting the pavement of the shows no fancy ceramic or marble tiles, but a simple bare floor with a rustic footwarmer and a few pieces of what appear to be bread crumbs and a loose straw scattered about. Modern art goers remain transfixed by the light and seemingly monumental character of the picture. But the humble subject matter of the painting was not accepted by all art lovers of Vermeer's times.

Although it is hard to understand today, in the seventeenth century there existed a clear hierarchy of subject matter in painting that was based on a conceptual distinction between art that was produced by an intellectual effort in order to "render visible the universal essence of things" (imitare in Italian) and that which merely consisted of "mechanical copying of particular appearances" (ritrarre). Gerard de Lairesse, a well-known art theoretician of the time, held that appropriate subjects were not those extracted from the artist's imagination or personal circumstances, such as those seen in Vermeer's interior paintings, but from texts: the Bible and Classical literature and mythology. Paintings of street peddlers, cuckolded husbands, kitchen maids, unruly country bumpkins and buxom courtesans would not do, despite the fact that they were eagerly collected by Dutch art buyers, giving birth to a veritable army of highly specialized Dutch painters. One of the most popular categories of painting was the kitchen scene, which had been developed in Southern Netherlands in the late part of the sixteenth century and had an reached unimaginable level of technical refinement. It is hard to understand if Vermeer's humble milkmaid owes anything to the great Flemish tradition but the artist must have been aware not only of classicist prescription but of the fact that in the Netherlands kitchen maids were often associated with licentious conduct.

Despite their popularity, De Lairesse recommended that paintings of kitchens should only be hung in kitchens due to their inherently vulgar subject matter. But evidently, Dutch buyers thought otherwise. Of seventy-two kitchen paintings described in specific rooms in Dutch inventories during the years from 1600 to 1679, only three were found in kitchens. Moreover, Vermeer's humble milkmaid was sold at a posthumous the now-famous Dissius auction held in Amsterdam for the considerable sum guilders 175 guilders: more than any of the 21 Vermeer's at the same auction except for the View of Delft, which is many times larger than The Milkmaid.