Johannes Vermeer | The Milkmaid

About The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer

Vermeer painted The Milkmaid around 1658, when he was in his mid-twenties. A kitchen maid stands at a table by a window, pouring milk from an earthenware jug into a bowl. Nothing else happens. It is one of the most quietly absolute paintings in European art.

What is startling is the seriousness. Kitchen maids appear constantly in Dutch painting of the period, almost always as comic figures or as objects of male attention. Vermeer gives this one the solidity of a monument — broad shoulders, rolled sleeves, strong forearms, complete absorption in a task — and lights her with the same care a portraitist would give a burgomaster.

He was also unusually extravagant with materials. The apron and tablecloth are painted in natural ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan and at the time worth more by weight than gold. He used it not just for the highlights but through the shadows too, which almost nobody did. X-rays have shown he originally painted a wall map and a laundry basket behind her, then removed both, leaving the wall bare.

Own a hand-painted Milkmaid

Look closely at the bread in the basket and you find Vermeer's strangest technique. The crusts are rendered as dozens of small, distinct, raised beads of thick pale paint — pointillé — sitting proud of the surface so that real light in the real room strikes them and throws real micro-shadows. The bread appears to glitter because it physically does. That effect is not an image of texture; it is texture, and no flat surface can carry it, however high the resolution. Painted by hand in oils, the beads of paint are actual beads of paint again, and the crust catches the light in your room the way it catches it in Amsterdam.

• A range of sizes — choose yours above. The original is small and upright; the composition holds up well at intimate scale.
• Framed and ready to hang, gallery wrap, or rolled canvas if you would rather frame it yourself.
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