The Milkmaid
Johannes Vermeer (1632 to 1675) · About 1660
A kitchen maid in a yellow bodice and blue apron pours milk from a jug into an earthenware bowl. That is all that happens, and it is enough. Light from the window on the left falls across a table laid with bread in a basket and a stoneware jug, catches the white cap and strong forearms of the woman, and leaves the bare wall behind her softly lit and slightly scuffed. On the floor by the skirting is a small foot warmer, and behind it a row of Delft tiles. The thin white thread of milk, held at the exact moment of pouring, is the still centre of the picture.
Vermeer built the surfaces with extraordinary care. The bread is painted with tiny dots of thick paint that catch the light like crumbs, an effect he may have observed through a lens. The blue of the apron is real ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli and more expensive than gold, used here on a servant's clothing. Look at the nail holes and the small nail in the wall behind her, and at the way her face is in shadow, so that we watch her attention rather than her expression. The painting is small, less than half a metre high, and the figure fills it with a monumental calm that has led people to call her the kitchen Madonna.
The Milkmaid was admired from the beginning and fetched high prices at Dutch sales in the eighteenth century. The Rijksmuseum bought it in 1908 from the Six family of Amsterdam, who had owned it for nearly two hundred years, after a national debate about whether the state should pay so much for a small picture of a servant. The purchase was approved by parliament, and the painting has been the most loved Vermeer in the country ever since. Look for the shape of a laundry basket that Vermeer painted out on the right, visible in recent scans.
Did You Know? Parliament had to vote on whether the state could spend the money to buy the Milkmaid in 1908, and it did, narrowly.
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