The Milkmaid

Vermeer painted this kitchen maid pouring milk in 1658, in his house on the Oude Langendijk in Delft. She stands alone in a corner of a kitchen, absorbed in her task, and that absorption is the entire subject of the painting. A young woman in a blue apron and a white cap pours a thin stream of milk from an earthenware jug into a stoneware bowl. On the table beside her: a basket of bread, a few pieces broken off, a blue cloth bunched at the edge. The wall behind her is pale, bare except for a few small nail holes and a foot warmer on the floor. The light comes from a window at the left, falling across her face and hands and the bread in warm, even tones. Vermeer was 26 when he painted this. He had been admitted to the Delft Guild of Saint Luke two years earlier and was producing the quiet domestic interiors that would make up his entire surviving output, roughly 34 paintings. He lived in his mother-in-law's house with his wife Catharina and their growing family, 11 children eventually. He painted slowly, perhaps two or three canvases a year, and he used expensive pigments: natural ultramarine for the apron, lead-tin yellow for the bread crust. The Milkmaid is one of the earliest and most physical of Vermeer's interiors. The figure is solid, almost monumental, filling the lower half of the canvas. Later Vermeer paintings become more ethereal, the figures thinner, the light more diffuse. Here the maid has weight and presence. Her forearms are thick, her stance planted, her attention complete. Oil on canvas, 45 by 41 centimeters, roughly 18 by 16 inches. Vermeer built the painting in layers, starting with a dark underpainting and working up to the highlights with thin glazes. The milk pouring from the jug is a single white highlight, a thin vertical line of lead white. The bread in the basket is painted with pointille dots of yellow and white, a technique Vermeer may have learned from the Delft artist Carel Fabritius. The warm light and domestic subject make this print work well in a kitchen, breakfast room, or hallway. The nearly square format suits a narrow wall space. A white or natural wood frame picks up the painting's palette. The 11x14 or 12x16 size gives the bread and the milk jug enough detail to appreciate up close. The painting has been in the Rijksmuseum since 1908, purchased with support from the Vereniging Rembrandt. It is one of the museum's most visited works. This is a public domain artwork from the Rijksmuseum. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.