The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer: Great Art Explained

By the mid-17th century, the age of flamboyant Baroque was in full swing.

It was an art movement that came from conflict.

Europe had experienced the reformation and counter reformation, the wars of religion and inquisitions.

The art being produced in Catholic countries had become a powerful tool of propaganda,

characterized by a heightened sense of drama,

movement and theatricality that had never been seen before.

But in the Netherlands a new wave of realism was sweeping across the country

- Johannes Vermeer was producing simple domestic interiors of middle-class life.

His paintings were quiet, private and unassuming.

Secular works that contain stories of real human relationships.

Vermeer's art would be totally forgotten about,

right up until the mid-19th century - the age of the camera.

His incredible mastery of hyper-realism would lead some people to question the authenticity of

Vermeer.

To question whether he used mechanical means to achieve such perfect illusions.

For some people, as we shall see, Johannes Vermeer is considered a "cheat".

In 1556 the Habsburgs took over the low countries what today is the Netherlands,

Belgium and Luxembourg, and ruled it as a Spanish province.

It was a clash of two dramatically different cultures: the northern territories were Protestant,

the southern Catholic.

"The 80 years war", ended in independence for the north in 1648,

while the Southern Netherlands remained Catholic and a part of Spain.

In the north the strict protestant sect of Calvinism became the nation's official religion.

Religious imagery was banned,

and an emphasis was placed on simplicity in both worship and decorative style.

The sharp break with the old monarchist and Catholic cultural traditions,

would mean that Dutch art had to reinvent itself almost entirely.

We know Vermeer was born in delft in 1632,

then next to nothing is known about him until he marries Catherina Bolnes in

1653.

She was Catholic and Vermeer almost certainly converted to Catholicism secretly before they married

- probably at the insistence of his wealthy mother-in-law,

who at first opposed the marriage.

Although Catholic mass was banned, freedom of religion in the Dutch republic was official,

and converting to Catholicism didn't bring Vermeer any personal or professional disadvantages.

The couple moved in with Catherina's mother

and Vermeer spent the rest of his life in the same town,

the same house, slowly producing paintings in the same room, on the second floor,

at a rate of two or three a year.

It is thought Vermeer produced 60

or so paintings of

which only 36 survive today.

Vermeer and Catherina had 15 children of which 11 survived.

We know at least five other adults lived in the same house,

as well as Vermeer's own 11 children!

And yet he never shows us any suggestion of family,

or the chaos that naturally comes with a household that big.

It is safe to say

that the peace and quiet Vermeer depicts in his paintings,

was not what he experienced in real life - maybe that is the point?

"Genre paintings" were scenes of everyday life,

ordinary people engaged in common activities

that both reflected and helped define ideals about the family,

love, morals, courtship, and duty.

In the 17th century, the Dutch republic dominated global trade,

and was the wealthiest country in the world.

But the dutch Calvinists were a frugal and austere group,

naturally inhibited and embarrassed by wealth.

Smaller, quiet, secular paintings became hugely popular,

and no longer the preserve of the church

or aristocracy or even the very wealthy.

Paintings could be found in shops, taverns and houses.

It was a boom time for artists.

Along with paintings, maps started to appear in homes,

appealing to the Dutch desire for order.

Cityscapes were an emblem of self-determination

and a sense of pride in the young Dutch republic.

While Dutch Calvinists denounced devotional artwork in churches,

they explicitly encouraged devotees to turn their attention to the visible world around them.

One of the most successful subcategories of genre painting was the "kitchen scene".

The Dutch saw hard work as spiritual, and household economy as a holy virtue,

moderation in all things.

There were so many Dutch artists producing genre paintings,

but if we look at these two paintings on the same theme,

we see there were none quite like Vermeer, whose quiet settings, serene lighting, cropping,

and ambiguousness made his scenes more universal than most genre paintings.

Artists borrowed themes and compositions from each other readily,

there was no shame in "copying".

Once a theme took off in sales, artists would produce their own variations.

Vermeer's paintings are all small but "The milkmaid" is very small.

It is oil on canvas.

According to conservators, it took two months to paint.

The first thing to note is

that she is not a milkmaid

but a domestic kitchen maid.

She is a young woman of a strong build, wearing a crisp linen cap,

a blue apron and work sleeves pushed up from thick forearms.

The unassuming maid is poised between action and introspection.

She is slowly pouring milk into a squat earthenware vessel commonly known

as a "Dutch Oven".

Her concentration and careful pouring, suggest she is following a precise recipe.

The Dutch Oven has a deep rim,

so a lid can be put on top for cooking.

In front of the pot are broken pieces of stale bread.

It is thought she is making some kind of bread pudding.

Her transformation of stale, unusable bread into something edible,

and her careful use of ingredients,

would have been picked up by the 17th-century Dutch

as an illustration of "Domestic Virtue",

a greatly admired value.

We don't know who the model is but Vermeer couldn't afford to pay models,

so used his family and servants.

It could be Tanneke Everpoel, a maid in Vermeer's house, but if it,

is it is not meant to be a "portrait".

Vermeer is really showing his astounding ability to suggest a vast range of textures.

The rough inexpensive material is a sharp contrast to his later paintings of middle-class

women.

After the "Milk Maid" Vermeer never again painted a working class theme.

The maid is wearing a starched cap.

He has painted wet-on-wet here,

as well as on other areas such as her sleeves,

then he adds texture with layers of thick paint or "Impasto".

The arm is a master class in wet-on-wet technique.

The rolled-up sleeves revealing a perfectly rendered "tan line".

The edges of her forearms are soft suggesting movement.

We can feel the tension she has to maintain to let the milk pour

out so slowly,

and we can also sense the liquid falling.

It really is as if her arms are moving.

He would do something similar with the guitar strings in this painting,

covered in my video: "Great art Cities: London".

The maid is wearing a yellow chamois leather top, painted with "Lead tin yellow",

the brightest yellow pigment available in Vermeer's time, and one of his preferred colours.

He would use the same yellow pigment in later representations of the famous fur

trimmed morning jackets,

adorned by elegant women.

The rough reddish stitching is not meant to be decorative,

and tells us it is a purely practical garment.

She wears a heavy blue apron over a red wool skirt,

which suggests that the picture was painted in winter.

In Vermeer's day there were a limited number of pigments,

and he only used about 20 of them,

but along with lead-tin yellow he did use expensive "Ultramarine" a lot.

It was made from crushed lapis lazuli,

a semi-precious stone imported from present-day Afghanistan.

We know Vermeer struggled financially most of his life

and we think it was his patron Pieter van Ruijven,

who supplied the artist with such costly pigment.

T he strange green sleeves are called "Morsemouwen" or "mess sleeves".

They are not part of the yellow bodice,

but are worn separately to protect against staining,

we can see them in other works.

Rather than under drawing Vermeer used a monochromatic layer where he would identify tone,

lighting, and composition.

He uses different blocks of colour for different areas of the painting,

which adds to the luminosity.

Vermeer famously uses a sort of "pointillism" in the bread

and basket which suggests light

as it flickers off the broken surface of the stale bread.

He uses dabs of ochre to show us the rough edges of the dry

bread,

giving us a texture which suggests staleness.

We first see his use of "pointilé" in this painting,

and the technique appears in about half of Vermeer's works.

The entire "still-life" on the table is a masterpiece,

that uses a combination of thin glazes, impasto, colour,

and a perfect depiction of light refraction, on every single crumb.

Unusually for the time, Vermeer uses impressionistic dabs of blue here,

which act as reflective highlights and intensifies the brick color of the stoneware.

Kitchen maids were often portrayed in Dutch paintings

and literature as "Discreet objects of desire"

and sexually threatening to the home.

Vermeer possibly acknowledged the tradition of "the maid as a sexual being",

by placing one of the Delft tiles behind her, depicting Cupid.

It is thought that she is in a cold kitchen

because here we can see a foot warmer.

These were wooden perforated boxes with hot coals inside.

There is a possibility Vermeer was using the foot warmer symbolically,

as in popular literature they were often associated with the heat of sex.

More likely he is referring to her inner warmth.

The 17th-century male viewer would have noticed the contrast of the rough leather sleeves

with the fleshy nudity of her exposed forearm,

which they would have found "titillating".

While we can't dismiss this erotic subtext, I do believe that Vermeer,

though not from the servant class, did marry above his station,

and treats the subject of a lower-class woman with dignity and empathy.

Vermeer's focus is on the maid as an "ideal woman",

a paragon of homely virtue.

She might be seen, even today, as the essence of the Dutch character: Strong,

simple and direct.

The painting is built up along two diagonal lines

that draw our attention to the pouring milk,

the focal point for both us, and the maid.

On the wall are a frame, a bread basket, and a pail.

They each retain their own distinct form and texture,

but they also cascade down towards the stream of milk.

The painting is from a low angle which gives her "monumentality".

Vermeer uses the classic pyramid shape as stability, which I have discussed before.

He not only used the same props again and again in his paintings,

but he also recycled the same poses.

This is a pose we have seen before in THIS painting,

but although the upper-class woman is surrounded by expensive furnishings

and the kitchen maid has nothing

but her clothes,

both women command our respect.

This x-ray shows us that originally, Vermeer had an overflowing clothes basket here,

but painted over it.

He also had a map on the wall behind the maid.

By taking these away, and leaving the white-washed wall,

it not only isolates the figures, but also reflects light and cleanliness.

If we look again at this painting we can see there are dirty dishes

waiting to be cleaned,

suggesting the servant is lazy and disorganized.

If Vermeer had left a full laundry basket,

he would be telling a different story, and by removing this, and the map,

he creates an uncluttered backdrop - both physically and psychologically.

Vermeer often placed a chair

or table or curtain in the foreground of his paintings,

to create a theatrical barrier,

and reinforce the sense of privacy between the figures and the viewer.

It also adds depth and three-dimensionality.

We can see the type of window

if we look at this painting Vermeer created of his aunt's house.

Windows in the 17th-century had small, uneven panes.

Top left lighting is an artistic convention, that goes back to Ancient Rome,

and as we've seen,

the windows in Vermeer's works are almost always to the left.

In this painting he shows them

as full of imperfections

and they are not clear,

leading to a more diffused softer light.

My favourite detail is this cracked pane,

which lets in a little beam of unfiltered light.

Light is of course what Vermeer is famous for, and the flow of light,

from left to right and its intensity activates the canvas.

The light gradually (and perfectly) diminishes as it flows from light to dark,

and every nail, hole, crack,

and crevice is treated with the same attention to detail as the pouring milk.

Vermeer takes a white wall and elevates it to a "picture-within-a-picture",

a stage-setting for the artist's quiet little drama.

The amount of work Vermeer produced was pretty meagre

and when he died his work was owned by just one

or two collectors in the small town of Delft.

The lack of exposure ensured

that his name just disappears from art history - completely - until 1866,

when a French art critic wrote about him.

Photography was just becoming popular at this time

and people couldn't help

but connect Vermeer's hyper-realistic work with the new technology.

Almost immediately, the suggestion arose

that Vermeer used a "Camera Obscura' the forerunner of the modern photographic camera,

as a way of copying.

A darkened room has a pinhole on one side and through this hole,

an inverted image is projected - via a lens - into a darkened space,

onto a canvas inside.

Now the question is: Did Vermeer use one to create his work?

The pro camera argument is the lack of underdrawings in his work,

the perfect perspective, and the portrayal of objects out of focus.

Like every theory there are endless variations.

The artist David Hockney famously made his case on the matter,

and in the 2013 film "Tim's Vermeer" they claimed to reproduce a Vermeer.

You can find links to these and counter theories in my video description.

As we know plenty of great artists didn't rely on underdrawing,

and if Vermeer did rely on a Camera Obscura to trace an image,

then there WOULD be an underdrawing.

The strongest argument for his use of "mechanical help" is his extremely accurate perspective.

Along with the hyper-realism, people asked: "How is this possible?"

Recent evidence shows that he used a more rudimentary method to obtain accurate perspective.

So far pin pricks have been found in 13 Vermeer paintings,

including "The Milkmaid" just above her right hand.

In fact it is visible to the naked eye - as we can see.

A string with chalk on it was attached to the pin,

which the painter would have snapped to get perspective lines.

A common method among Dutch artists.

My question is: Why would Vermeer use this method to work out perspective,

if he was simply "tracing the image" with a camera obscura?

Of course there is a possibility he used optical aids of some kind,

but I'm not convinced, and there is no solid evidence.

To be frank, I don't think it's that important, if it is true,

it is just one process of making a painting

and doesn't detract from Vermeer's unique genius.

The introduction of quiet everyday scenes of life unfolding in private households,

was among the most striking innovations of the Dutch golden age.

Vermeer infused his scenes of daily life with layer upon layer of meaning.

We come out with more questions than answers - and that's exciting.

There is an intriguing "mystery" about "The Milkmaid" that keeps us coming back.

In 1672, France invaded the Netherlands

and Vermeer fell victim to the disastrous economic climate

that followed.

The art market collapsed overnight, and he would die just three years later,

leaving behind a wife, 11 children, and enormous debts.

His large family had to sell everything - just to survive.

We can't really say Vermeer was "forgotten" as he was never really known.

Perhaps it is the quiet unassuming nature of Vermeer's work,

that means it took hundreds of years for him to even get noticed.

Perhaps the world came to realise,

that the quiet moments are often the most profound.