The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer

The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer

A thread of milk

A young woman stands at a table by a window, pouring milk from a jug into a wide earthenware bowl, so steadily that the stream is a single thread of white. On the table are a basket of bread, broken pieces of crust, a blue stoneware jug and a crumpled blue cloth. A wicker basket and a brass pail hang on the wall, and on the floor a foot warmer stands in front of a row of Delft tiles. The wall itself is bare and whitewashed, but Vermeer has painted its nail holes and stains as carefully as the maid’s face.

Light on bread

The light comes from the window at the left and gathers on the maid’s white cap, her forearms and the table. Vermeer puts small dots of pale paint on the crusts of the bread and the rim of the basket, so that they seem to glitter, and the apron is painted in costly ultramarine, made from ground lapis lazuli. Nothing much is happening, and that is the point: an ordinary task in a kitchen, given the weight and stillness of a much grander subject.

Where it hangs

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam bought the painting in 1908. It measures 45.5 by 41 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 4,485-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 29 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam · Wikidata Q167605 · Wikimedia Commons