By the mid-17th century, the age of
flamboyant Baroque was in full swing. It was an art movement that came from conflict. Europe had experienced the reformation and counter
reformation, the wars of religion and inquisitions. The art being produced in Catholic countries had
become a powerful tool of propaganda, characterized by a heightened sense of drama, movement and
theatricality that had never been seen before. But in the Netherlands a new wave of realism
was sweeping across the country - Johannes Vermeer was producing simple domestic interiors of
middle-class life. His paintings were quiet, private and unassuming. Secular works that
contain stories of real human relationships. Vermeer's art would be totally forgotten about,
right up until the mid-19th century - the age of the camera. His incredible mastery of
hyper-realism would lead some people to question the authenticity of Vermeer. To question
whether he used mechanical means to achieve such perfect illusions. For some people, as we shall
see, Johannes Vermeer is considered a "cheat". In 1556 the Habsburgs took over the low countries
what today is the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, and ruled it as a Spanish province. It
was a clash of two dramatically different cultures: the northern territories were
Protestant, the southern Catholic. "The 80 years war", ended in independence for the
north in 1648, while the Southern Netherlands remained Catholic and a part of Spain. In the
north the strict protestant sect of Calvinism became the nation's official religion. Religious
imagery was banned, and an emphasis was placed on simplicity in both worship and decorative
style. The sharp break with the old monarchist and Catholic cultural traditions, would mean that
Dutch art had to reinvent itself almost entirely. We know Vermeer was born in delft in 1632,
then next to nothing is known about him until he marries Catherina Bolnes in 1653. She was
Catholic and Vermeer almost certainly converted to Catholicism secretly before they married - probably
at the insistence of his wealthy mother-in-law, who at first opposed the marriage. Although
Catholic mass was banned, freedom of religion in the Dutch republic was official, and converting
to Catholicism didn't bring Vermeer any personal or professional disadvantages. The couple moved
in with Catherina's mother and Vermeer spent the rest of his life in the same town, the same house,
slowly producing paintings in the same room, on the second floor, at a rate of two or three a year.
It is thought Vermeer produced 60 or so paintings of which only 36 survive today. Vermeer
and Catherina had 15 children of which 11 survived. We know at least five other adults
lived in the same house, as well as Vermeer's own 11 children! And yet he never shows us any
suggestion of family, or the chaos that naturally comes with a household that big.
It is safe to say that the peace and quiet Vermeer depicts in his paintings, was not what he
experienced in real life - maybe that is the point? "Genre paintings" were scenes of everyday life,
ordinary people engaged in common activities that both reflected and helped define ideals about
the family, love, morals, courtship, and duty. In the 17th century, the Dutch republic dominated global
trade, and was the wealthiest country in the world. But the dutch Calvinists were a frugal and
austere group, naturally inhibited and embarrassed by wealth. Smaller, quiet, secular paintings became
hugely popular, and no longer the preserve of the church or aristocracy or even the very wealthy.
Paintings could be found in shops, taverns and houses. It was a boom time for artists. Along
with paintings, maps started to appear in homes, appealing to the Dutch desire for order. Cityscapes
were an emblem of self-determination and a sense of pride in the young Dutch republic. While Dutch
Calvinists denounced devotional artwork in churches, they explicitly encouraged devotees to turn
their attention to the visible world around them. One of the most successful subcategories
of genre painting was the "kitchen scene". The Dutch saw hard work as spiritual,
and household economy as a holy virtue, moderation in all things. There were so many
Dutch artists producing genre paintings, but if we look at these two paintings on the same
theme, we see there were none quite like Vermeer, whose quiet settings, serene lighting, cropping,
and ambiguousness made his scenes more universal than most genre paintings. Artists borrowed themes
and compositions from each other readily, there was no shame in "copying". Once a theme took off in
sales, artists would produce their own variations. Vermeer's paintings are all small but "The milkmaid"
is very small. It is oil on canvas. According to conservators, it took two months to paint. The first
thing to note is that she is not a milkmaid but a domestic kitchen maid. She is a young woman
of a strong build, wearing a crisp linen cap, a blue apron and work sleeves pushed up from
thick forearms. The unassuming maid is poised between action and introspection. She is slowly
pouring milk into a squat earthenware vessel commonly known as a "Dutch Oven". Her concentration
and careful pouring, suggest she is following a precise recipe. The Dutch Oven has a deep rim, so
a lid can be put on top for cooking. In front of the pot are broken pieces of stale bread. It is
thought she is making some kind of bread pudding. Her transformation of stale, unusable bread
into something edible, and her careful use of ingredients, would have been picked up by the
17th-century Dutch as an illustration of "Domestic Virtue", a greatly admired value. We don't know
who the model is but Vermeer couldn't afford to pay models, so used his family and servants. It
could be Tanneke Everpoel, a maid in Vermeer's house, but if it, is it is not meant to be a "portrait".
Vermeer is really showing his astounding ability to suggest a vast range of textures. The rough
inexpensive material is a sharp contrast to his later paintings of middle-class women. After the
"Milk Maid" Vermeer never again painted a working class theme. The maid is wearing a starched cap.
He has painted wet-on-wet here, as well as on other areas such as her sleeves, then he adds
texture with layers of thick paint or "Impasto". The arm is a master class in wet-on-wet technique.
The rolled-up sleeves revealing a perfectly rendered "tan line". The edges of her forearms are
soft suggesting movement. We can feel the tension she has to maintain to let the milk pour out so
slowly, and we can also sense the liquid falling. It really is as if her arms are moving. He would do something similar with
the guitar strings in this painting, covered in my video: "Great art Cities: London".
The maid is wearing a yellow chamois leather top, painted with "Lead tin yellow", the brightest yellow
pigment available in Vermeer's time, and one of his preferred colours. He would use the same yellow
pigment in later representations of the famous fur trimmed morning jackets, adorned by elegant women.
The rough reddish stitching is not meant to be decorative, and tells us it is a purely practical
garment. She wears a heavy blue apron over a red wool skirt, which suggests that the picture was
painted in winter. In Vermeer's day there were a limited number of pigments, and he only used
about 20 of them, but along with lead-tin yellow he did use expensive "Ultramarine" a lot. It was made
from crushed lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone imported from present-day Afghanistan. We know
Vermeer struggled financially most of his life and we think it was his patron Pieter van Ruijven,
who supplied the artist with such costly pigment. T he strange green sleeves are called "Morsemouwen"
or "mess sleeves". They are not part of the yellow bodice, but are worn separately to
protect against staining, we can see them in other works. Rather than under drawing Vermeer used a
monochromatic layer where he would identify tone, lighting, and composition. He uses different blocks
of colour for different areas of the painting, which adds to the luminosity. Vermeer famously
uses a sort of "pointillism" in the bread and basket which suggests light as it flickers off the broken
surface of the stale bread. He uses dabs of ochre to show us the rough edges of the dry bread, giving
us a texture which suggests staleness. We first see his use of "pointilé" in this painting, and the
technique appears in about half of Vermeer's works. The entire "still-life" on the table is a
masterpiece, that uses a combination of thin glazes, impasto, colour, and a perfect depiction of
light refraction, on every single crumb. Unusually for the time, Vermeer uses impressionistic dabs
of blue here, which act as reflective highlights and intensifies the brick color of the stoneware.
Kitchen maids were often portrayed in Dutch paintings and literature as "Discreet objects
of desire" and sexually threatening to the home. Vermeer possibly acknowledged the tradition of
"the maid as a sexual being", by placing one of the Delft tiles behind her, depicting Cupid.
It is thought that she is in a cold kitchen because here we can see a foot warmer. These were
wooden perforated boxes with hot coals inside. There is a possibility Vermeer was using the
foot warmer symbolically, as in popular literature they were often associated with the heat of sex.
More likely he is referring to her inner warmth. The 17th-century male viewer would have noticed
the contrast of the rough leather sleeves with the fleshy nudity of her exposed forearm, which
they would have found "titillating". While we can't dismiss this erotic subtext, I do believe
that Vermeer, though not from the servant class, did marry above his station, and treats the
subject of a lower-class woman with dignity and empathy. Vermeer's focus is on the maid
as an "ideal woman", a paragon of homely virtue. She might be seen, even today, as the essence of
the Dutch character: Strong, simple and direct. The painting is built up along two diagonal lines
that draw our attention to the pouring milk, the focal point for both us, and the maid. On the wall
are a frame, a bread basket, and a pail. They each retain their own distinct form and texture, but
they also cascade down towards the stream of milk. The painting is from a low angle
which gives her "monumentality". Vermeer uses the classic pyramid shape as
stability, which I have discussed before. He not only used the same props again and again in
his paintings, but he also recycled the same poses. This is a pose we have seen before in THIS
painting, but although the upper-class woman is surrounded by expensive furnishings and
the kitchen maid has nothing but her clothes, both women command our respect. This x-ray shows
us that originally, Vermeer had an overflowing clothes basket here, but painted over it. He
also had a map on the wall behind the maid. By taking these away, and leaving the white-washed
wall, it not only isolates the figures, but also reflects light and cleanliness. If we
look again at this painting we can see there are dirty dishes waiting to be cleaned,
suggesting the servant is lazy and disorganized. If Vermeer had left a full laundry basket, he
would be telling a different story, and by removing this, and the map, he creates an uncluttered
backdrop - both physically and psychologically. Vermeer often placed a chair or table or curtain
in the foreground of his paintings, to create a theatrical barrier, and reinforce the sense
of privacy between the figures and the viewer. It also adds depth and three-dimensionality.
We can see the type of window if we look at this painting Vermeer created of his aunt's house.
Windows in the 17th-century had small, uneven panes. Top left lighting is an artistic
convention, that goes back to Ancient Rome, and as we've seen, the windows in Vermeer's works
are almost always to the left. In this painting he shows them as full of imperfections and they are
not clear, leading to a more diffused softer light. My favourite detail is this cracked pane, which
lets in a little beam of unfiltered light. Light is of course what Vermeer is famous for,
and the flow of light, from left to right and its intensity activates the canvas. The
light gradually (and perfectly) diminishes as it flows from light to dark, and every
nail, hole , crack, and crevice is treated with the same attention to detail as the
pouring milk. Vermeer takes a white wall and elevates it to a "picture-within-a-picture", a
stage-setting for the artist's quiet little drama. The amount of work Vermeer produced was pretty
meagre and when he died his work was owned by just one or two collectors in the small town of
Delft. The lack of exposure ensured that his name just disappears from art history - completely - until
1866, when a French art critic wrote about him. Photography was just becoming popular at this time
and people couldn't help but connect Vermeer's hyper-realistic work with the new technology.
Almost immediately, the suggestion arose that Vermeer used a "Camera Obscura' the forerunner of
the modern photographic camera, as a way of copying. A darkened room has a pinhole on one side and
through this hole, an inverted image is projected - via a lens - into a darkened space, onto a canvas
inside. Now the question is: Did Vermeer use one to create his work? The pro camera argument
is the lack of underdrawings in his work, the perfect perspective, and the portrayal of objects
out of focus. Like every theory there are endless variations. The artist David Hockney famously
made his case on the matter, and in the 2013 film "Tim's Vermeer" they claimed to reproduce a Vermeer.
You can find links to these and counter theories in my video description. As we know plenty
of great artists didn't rely on underdrawing, and if Vermeer did rely on a Camera Obscura to
trace an image, then there WOULD be an underdrawing. The strongest argument for his use of "mechanical
help" is his extremely accurate perspective. Along with the hyper-realism,
people asked: "How is this possible?" Recent evidence shows that he used
a more rudimentary method to obtain accurate perspective. So far pin pricks have
been found in 13 Vermeer paintings, including "The Milkmaid" just above her right hand. In fact
it is visible to the naked eye - as we can see. A string with chalk on it was attached to the
pin, which the painter would have snapped to get perspective lines. A common method among Dutch
artists. My question is: Why would Vermeer use this method to work out perspective, if he was
simply "tracing the image" with a camera obscura? Of course there is a possibility he used optical
aids of some kind, but I'm not convinced, and there is no solid evidence. To be frank, I don't
think it's that important, if it is true, it is just one process of making a painting and
doesn't detract from Vermeer's unique genius. The introduction of quiet everyday scenes of
life unfolding in private households, was among the most striking innovations of the Dutch golden
age. Vermeer infused his scenes of daily life with layer upon layer of meaning. We come out with
more questions than answers - and that's exciting. There is an intriguing "mystery" about "The Milkmaid"
that keeps us coming back. In 1672, France invaded the Netherlands and Vermeer fell victim to
the disastrous economic climate that followed. The art market collapsed overnight, and he would
die just three years later, leaving behind a wife, 11 children, and enormous debts. His large
family had to sell everything - just to survive. We can't really say Vermeer was "forgotten" as he
was never really known. Perhaps it is the quiet unassuming nature of Vermeer's work, that means it
took hundreds of years for him to even get noticed. Perhaps the world came to realise, that the
quiet moments are often the most profound.
