Name: The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer: Great Art Explained
Uploaded: 2024-06-28T05:32:35.000Z
Duration: 18 min 29 s
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By the mid-17th century, the age of flamboyant Baroque was in full swing.

It was an art movement that came from conflict.

Past perfect

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.

It was characterised 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 contained 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 Eighty 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.

Vermeer's 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 married Katerina Bolnes in 1653.

He 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 Katerina'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 2 or 3 a year.

It is thought Vermeer produced 60 or so paintings, of which only 36 survive today.

Vermeer and Katerina had 15 children, of which 11 survived.

We know at least 5 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.

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.

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 sub-categories 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.

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.

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 Tanika Everpol, 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 milkmaid, Vermeer never again painted a working-class theme.

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 masterclass 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.

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

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 twenty 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 Rookven, who supplied the artist with such costly pigment.

The strange green sleeves are called moosmoorven, or mess-sleeves.

They are not part of the yellow bodies, but are worn separately to protect against staining.

Rather than underdrawing, 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 pointillé 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 colour of the stoneware.

Kitchen maids were often portrayed in Dutch paintings and literature as discrete 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.

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The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer: Great Art Explained

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