Girl with a Pearl Earring
Mauritshuis, The Hague
The Milkmaid, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1660. Oil on canvas, 45.5 × 41 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain (Rijksmuseum).
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Dutch Golden Age
The Milkmaid
Johannes Vermeer · c. 1660
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 45.5 × 41 cm
- Held by
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
- Licence
- Public domain (Rijksmuseum)
- Movement
- Dutch Golden Age
- Country
- Netherlands
The painter
Johannes Vermeer
Around thirty-five paintings by Vermeer are generally accepted, which for a career of roughly twenty years is about two a year — a rate that tells you most of what you need to know about how he worked. He spent his whole life in Delft, ran an art dealing business inherited from his father, served twice as head of the painters' guild, had fifteen children of whom eleven survived him, and died in debt at forty-three, leaving his widow to petition for bankruptcy. Almost all the paintings are interiors, most lit from a window on the left, and many reuse the same objects and the same corner of the same room.
Nearby
Related works
View of Delft
Mauritshuis, The Hague
What to look at
The painting is about an unremarkable act performed with total attention: a kitchen maid pouring milk from a jug into a bowl. Vermeer gives her the monumentality normally reserved for religious figures — she is lit from a single window on the left, set against a plain wall, and built as a solid pyramid. The famous passage is the bread. Look at the crust: it is made of small raised dots of lead-white and ochre, almost like beads, catching light individually. Vermeer used that stippling where he wanted a surface to sparkle, and it probably comes from observing the optical artefacts a camera obscura produces around bright edges. The wall behind her is not blank either — there are a nail and its shadow, and a patched hole, both painted with real care. The blue of her apron is natural ultramarine, ground lapis lazuli, which cost more than the canvas and the frame together.