on vermeer’s light or evening breaks

The painting is  known as De Melkmeid, or Het Melkmeisje, or The Milkmaid.  It’s often incorrectly referred to as Woman with a Milk Jug or more rarely, The Kitchen Maid, after the series of Dutch women paintings rendered by Johannes Vermeer.  Executed between 1658 and 1661, The Milkmaid is an oil on canvas currently housed at The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Lesser known than Girl With a Pearl Earring, it is The Milkmaid that is considered Vermeer’s masterpiece in most art circles.  A 2009 New York Times article explores the 18-inch painting a bit more.

And if you should miss not only the illusion of light, but also the subtler references to the cookware, there nearly under the Milmaid’s left foot is a room warmer of the day framed by purposeful cupid tiles on the lower wall curtain.  This alludes not only to cozy interiors, but also to the warmth of domestic life, the stability and health of the young woman, and possibly (if some reviews are to be believed), the ebb and flow of restraint and permission.  In other words, a return to concentration on rural agrarianism.  Simplicity in nature.  Even still, we are meant to understand we are voyeurs.  Always looking upon that which on the surface appears innocent, for the sole purpose of uncovering and understanding any underlying reality.  We must also consider that Vermeer painted what was available to his eye.  Those visions surely contained a full-bodied emotional life and this contributes to the many theories about the meaning of the painting.

There is no flattery here: this thick-muscled,

broad-bottomed girl has milked cows at

dawn and carried sloshing pails

hung from a yoke on shoulders

broadened to the task. She kneaded

fat mounds of dough, sinking heavy fists deep

into voluptuous bread, innocent

and sensuous as a child in spring mud.

Evenings she mends and patches

the coarse wool of her bodice, smelling

her own sweat, sweet like grass and dung

in the barn or like warm milk

fresh from the udder.

Her world is grained and gritty, deep-

textured, rough-hewn, earth-toned, solid,

simple and crude. Reed and brass and clay,

wheat and flax and plaster turned to human use

have not come far from the loamy fields

where they were mined and gathered. The things

she handles are round and square, though-

fibered and strong, familiar as flesh to the touch.

The jug rests in her hand like a baby’s

bottom. She bends to her task like a mother

tending her child, hand and eye trained

to this work, heart left to its pondering.

How like tenderness, this look

of complete attention, how like a prayer

that blesses these loaves, this milk

(round like this belly, full like this breast),

given daily into her keeping, this handmaid

on whom the light falls,

haloed in white, hallowed by the gaze

that sees her thus, heavy, thick-lipped,

weathered and earthbound, blessed

and full of grace.

“The MilkMaid” by Marilyn Chandler McIntyre

Vermeer’s getting a second look here in the United States as Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (below) is currently on loan and exhibition to The Getty in Los Angeles until March 31, 2013.  You can find other Vermeers in permanent collections in the US here.  Vermeers throughout the world are found here.  A wonderful article on Vermeer’s palette is here. An article I found on Vermeer’s use of light and the break of evening appears below.

“Another cold morning, though not as cold as yesterday. The duck pond is free of ice, but barely; the surface ripples thickly as if it had thought to freeze but hadn’t quite made up its mind before the dawn broke. Now the sun filters weakly golden through the leafless crags of trees like a bit of tarnished jewelry, diffusing around the broken lines of branches, emphasizing their nakedness without clarifying their geometry. At least the world survived another long night. It usually does.