The Milkmaid by Vermeer, and all its Secret Knowledge

[Music] hi welcome to storage of art my name is Carol harukoper and today let's have a look at one of the prettiest paintings ever made it's the milk made by Vermeer which really is a terrible title for a lovely painting because it's not a milkmaid a milkmaid is a girl who milks cows this is a kitchen made making porridge using milk but for some reason it got this title over time and somehow it stuck it is such a seemingly simple picture though of a quiet kitchen where a maid is performing a simple task of pouring milk from one vessel into another she's standing there completely quiet almost staturesque a strong young woman absorbed in her work she focuses completely on pouring the milk evenly using both hands I guess The Jug is heavy or she's just being very careful and it's remarkable that Vermeer chose to take such a simple common task and elevate it to the subject of great art but as we shall see she stands for a number of the ideals that were very important in Dutch Society at the time and some would say still are to this day it's actually one of his earliest genre pictures made probably between 1658 and 1660. we're not sure as it's not dated and today you can find it in the reaction Museum in Amsterdam it's actually a surprisingly small painting of only 45.4 centimeters in height and even for a Vermeer painting that's quite small but even within that tiny space it's filled with details and we're going to have a look at them all but first a little bit of background about Vermeer I spoke about his life in more detail in a different video I made about him so I'm not going to repeat that and if you're interested in that one I put the link at the end of this video but suffice it to say that he lived in the city of delft in the province of Holland and that he probably made most of his money as an art dealer rather than an art producer he only made about 37 paintings that still exist today and not all of those are universally accepted as real vermeers and we think that he probably only painted about a hundred paintings in all but all of them are of exceptional quality and they display These Quiet homely scenes that are often compared to silent poetry which must have been at odds with his reality because he had quite a crowded household he and his wife had 14 or possibly 15 children most of whom survived him which means that his house must have been filled with noise at all hours and must have been completely different from the quiet sort of scenes that he painted and apparently he usually worked in the same room that he must have used to set his scenes up in but he changed all kinds of aspects of the space to suit his picture for instance he usually has his windows on the left side this is actually quite normal you'll see this in many pictures that the light usually comes from the left one of the reasons for that is that most painters like most people are right-handed and if you choose a setup with a window on the other side you are forever working in the shadow of your own hands but with Vermeer you see the same or a very similar room in many of his paintings in most of them it's a luxurious room filled with good furniture and marble tiles on the floor but not in this case this is a workspace probably a kitchen and we can see that in everything the floor has a terracotta color those may be tiles but we can't tell and there's stuff strewn across it it could use a bit of sweeping the walls are rough there's lots of little bumps and scrapes on it you can see that Nails have been hammered in and taken out over time and no one has bothered to fill in the holes properly it's actually remarkable how much effort he has put in just painting that much detail in a white black wool of course today it's a little bit difficult to see the damage he painted until it apart from the cracks in the paint but isn't it wonderful how close up we can get in these pictures these days I can tell you it would be very difficult to do that in the museum because there's always a crowd in front of it we can also see that the window is quite simple in the more luxurious rooms that Vermeer painted we can see that the little panes of glass would often be set in ornate patterns there weren't very large panes of glass yet in the 17th century so there were always small ones set in lead strips but in the Richer rooms you would have it set in a pattern and it's often with parts stained glass in it but this is not a luxurious room so the panes are plain and there's even one that's broken also the window is set quite High which suggests that we are in a Sutra so a floor that's not quite a basement but a little bit below street level and that is where kitchens usually were it's a sparse workplace with no decorations on the walls everything seems utilitarian even that basket and that bucket that hang on the wall and in that space the maid this woman fits perfectly she's simply dressed in a color scheme that Vermeer used on several occasions for women this yellow jacket and a blue skirt here for instance we see a woman wearing the same sort of thing on the view of delft perhaps this was really a fashion or perhaps he just liked the color combinations I really don't know but even so we can see that her clothing is simple just look at the rough stitching that he clearly painted there to emphasize just that she also has some sort of white undergarment on which is done up all the way to her neck and of course there's this beautiful blue skirt that hangs off her in all these wonderful folds it is of course painted in lapis lazuli which was hugely expensive but so worth it because it really stands out I say of course he painted it in lapis lastly because Vermeer tended to use the most expensive pigments there were but note that it's not the only skirt she's wearing there's a reddish one underneath so she's wearing quite a few layers suggesting that it's a cold season perhaps winter but even so she's pulled up her sleeves revealing her tanned arms and you can see that the tan line isn't that far up her arm meaning that she usually wears her sleeves down low so in this case she pulled them up so she doesn't get them dirty and you can see that on her upper arms there's a different color in her garments those are separate sleeves that you can pull over your clothing known in Dutch as marshmallow and I guess in English those would be called spill sleeves or something I'm not sure if it's a word in English they are separate sleeves that you pull over your regular ones so as not to get your clothing dirty it's basically an apron for your arms these days you'll find people wearing them in the fish shop while cleaning fish or in a butcher shop or something and actually it's kind of surprising that she wears those without wearing an apron but if she were we wouldn't be able to see that beautiful blue skirt and she's pouring milk into an earthenware pot you can see that it has a wide rim that suggests that it has a lid that fits on top it's the sort of thing that you would place in the Embers of a fire to slowly cook something that is why I said at the beginning of this video that she was making porridge to me it looks like all that bread that she has in front of her is her other ingredient there's a big woven basket there with a big loaf of bread in it but next to it there's all this bread that she has broken up into pieces so my guess is that she's already put a number of pieces in the pot and now she's filling it up with milk to a certain level and we'll then place it in the fire with a lid on it's called bread porridge and it's a very simple breakfast or well meal in general made out of leftovers I mean you typically use the stale bread from the day before to make the porridge with and making new food from leftovers is Frugal and the Dutch love being Frugal to the point that I believe there's a stereotype of the Dutch being cheap but not wasting stuff was seen as very virtuous and so is by the way the act of making food preparing a meal in general it is a humble but honorable task that she's performing and she's doing it with such severity and focus that she must be a very virtuous woman and all of that is emphasized by the fact that she's made to look tall that is she sticks out far above the Horizon now how would I know that I mean you can't see any Horizon well we can figure out where the vanishing point is and the vanishing point is always on the horizon we do that by taking the lines in the window of those lead strips and we extend them and then you see that they converge somewhere above her wrist so that's the vanishing point and the height of the Horizon and everything that sticks out above the Horizon is higher than our vantage point so he used his perspective to elevate her now there's one thing that always comes up when you discuss paintings by from here and especially when you talk about perspective and that is did he use optical devices to make his pictures and he may well have we have some very good indications that he may have used something like a camera obscura so let's take a little bit of a detour here because I want to make two different points about this in a minute I'll get to whether I think he used any or what he used it for but first let me address a different issue and that is the comments that I always get about this you see for some reason people seem to think that using optical devices like a camera obscura is somehow cheating and this of course is complete nonsense for a number of reasons the main one may be that there's no such thing as cheating in art you see it's not a competition and all artists through all the ages ever have always used the best materials and the best tools available to them to make the best Works they possibly could if they didn't we'd still be painting with their hands on the inside of caves and I doubt anybody thinks that that using a brush to paint is somehow cheating compared to blowing pigment over your hand in a cave wall having said that artists have always been secretive about their methods just like in any other professions because you don't want your clients or your competitors to know your secrets this doesn't just apply to the use of optical devices but also to the making of paint or the construction of panels the right way of making your ground really anything related to the business of painting or sculpture or architecture for that matter in some cities the gills would actually forbid taking information or the Trade Secrets out of the city and in other cases artists wouldn't even share their secret recipes for paints or whatever with other artists because they thought it gave them an edge it's very much like any chef today would not share their secret recipes either and to think that if you have certain tools and you make good pictures with them the use of these tools suddenly makes you less of an artist is well frankly silly these days anyone can make a picture with a camera and if we can get our hands on them we can all use the finest cameras in the entire world but with them I can still not make the pictures as good as a really good photographer would because I am not an artist just like you could buy the best tools in the whole world but it still doesn't make you even a decent Carpenter that comes from other skills now the idea of Vermeer using a camera obscura is very old but it was popularized by David hockney and actually first book and then a series of documentaries they're called secret knowledge now the book was published I think in 2006 and the documentary I suppose came out a couple of years later you can still find it in its entirety on YouTube and the book is still for sale everywhere and I do recommend watching it or preferably even reading the book because it's better and you should do that obviously after you've finished watching all of my videos and lots of people have watched these documentaries or maybe they haven't but they've just heard little excerpts of it and have drawn very strange conclusions from it and this is where this cheating idea comes in that David hockney certainly wouldn't say and he didn't in the documentary nor in the books what he explained in his secret knowledge is that artists have used optical devices throughout history that is at least for the last four or five hundred years and at the time some of this was new information art historians already agreed that optical devices were used from say the 1480s onwards but in hockney's work he just sort of pushed that boundary back about 50 or 60 years he claims for instance that Jonathan AG couldn't have already used Optical projections for his work now I'm not going to debate that here that's for another video and by the way he may well be right but as I said we know all kinds of optical devices were used at least in the 16th century and certainly in the 17th we know this because it wasn't a complete secret there are several descriptions from those centuries of artists who simply said they did it so really there's not much of a controversy for people to say that an artist made use of a camera obscura these things were around they were demonstrated all over the place and they were available to anyone including artists so let me tell you briefly what it is a camera obscura is simply a box with a hole in one side in which you fit a lens a flight is shown on that lens it will project whatever it sees on the other side of the box it will be in color it will be moving because it's not recording anything and it will be upside down now the theory is that Vermeer and other artists used a box that was big enough to stand in so basically a walk-in closet or something of a size like that and they could have objects placed in a room then stand in their camera obscura and simply trace the outlines of what they saw and undoubtedly some artists did this now this is a tool as I said and it doesn't detract from the quality of the artist it's a tool like there are so many and it's only the people using the tool that can determine whether they use it well or not but here comes my second point there's a lot of confusion about what they used it for you see I've seen and read many different explanations about Vermeer and his supposed use of a camera obscura and people always seem to get it wrong they think he used it for perspective and the argument is something like this Vermeer made such perfect perspective in his paintings and therefore he used a camera obscura and this is simply not true first of all his perspective is far from perfect it's pretty good but it's not perfect but more importantly you don't need a camera obscura to paint a picture in good perspective the main reason for that is that it's not the right tool to do it with if you want to construct a room in a picture you simply use linear perspective it's simple it's easy and it's actually much easier than using a camera obscura and we know for sure that Vermeer used the traditional form of linear perspective to make almost every one of his paintings and we know this for sure because we can see it you see linear perspective is a very simple thing to learn I've taught children to do it correctly all you need is an horizon that you simply make up where you want to have it and you need a vanishing point which is on the horizon and then there's a bunch of other little points and tricks that you need to follow and I'll explain it all in the video on perspectives that have been meaning to make for ages but one thing that we no artists would always use and is actually essential for proper linear perspective is you need a PIN to be placed in your vanishing point so you can attach a piece of string to it that piece of string helps you determine several of your other points in the construction of your perspective of your imagine space and it also helps you to set up the lines that you need to vanish into the vanishing point and as I mentioned before in this case those lines would be the lines along the window those parallel lines between the window panes if we extend them they should all converge in one spot and that spot is the vanishing point and if we look closely there on that spot we can actually still see the remains of the pinprick he painted over it of course after he tried to fill it but over time that software filler would shrink away and that's why it can usually still find it and in many of the other vermeers they're often more difficult to find but of course these days we have so many techniques to look into the paint that as far as I know every Vermeer that has ever been studied has a pinprick in the vanishing point which and I can't stress this enough proves that he used the traditional form of linear perspective so if he didn't use a camera obscura for that then what did he use it for well first of all I actually do think he used a camera obscure at least he very well could have you see the foremost maker of lenses in the entire low countries and that makes it in the entire world at the time was a man called Antonius van leibohoek and Vermeer and he were buddies well I'm not sure if they were actually buddies but vanle was the executor of vermeer's will and that just makes it likely that Vermeer had access to some of the best lenses that they were made anywhere on the planet now in his book David hockney explains that Vermeer did something very strange in his pictures he sometimes painted things out of focus and this really is a very very strange thing and he actually did that it is so strange because it's very difficult to realize things can even be out of focus if you're not used to seeing them on photographs or in films or in other things that have been shown to you through a lens and I really agree with that point by hockney for instance in this case some of the objects hung on the wall in the corner are slightly out of focus which really makes you think that he was used to seeing projections like the ones you get from a camera obscura but there's something else that I think Vermeer used it for you see there's this uncanny realism in pictures by Vermeer and one of the reasons that it becomes so real is because of his highlights and those are those little bits of white that show us where the light is gleaming off of an object the problem with painting those is that they move whenever you move your head and with Vermeer they always seem completely spot on now that is something that you can actually capture with the camera obscura because the lens you see things through would not move but also if you look at the still life of the bread that we see here if we zoom in you can see that they're made up of little dobs of paint and that is an unusual almost pointillistic way of painting that we don't know of any other artist of his age in fact I don't think anyone did it as much until Monday would in the 19th century and he was clearly very much inspired by the worker Vermeer and I say this because well monat said it himself he had seen the view of delft that's this painting and he had seen this slightly odd technique just look at this boat when we zoom in really closely now on the milkmaid there's this little still life and if you zoom in closely it almost seems to fall apart into little Dobbs of paint and perhaps that is something he could have painted using a camera obscura because it's an excellent tool to do that with by the way that doesn't mean that this girl would have stood there all the time pouring milk while he stood in a different room painting it it would only be the still life part of this painting because it would take him hours and hours to do that probably days most likely he constructed his painting from various sketches and preliminary studies that he made at other times because famously Vermeer worked very very slowly most paintings would take him months to finish and you wouldn't expect this girl to be standing around for that long just pouring milk now would you now there's another detail that I haven't touched on yet and that's this little box in the corner it's a food stove which was a very common item in a Dutch household right up until the time Central Heating was invented it's a simple wooden box open to one side with holes in the top in it you can see there's a little earthenware pot it's called a stove bomb you would put some hot coals in there and then put it in the box and then women would have them underneath their skirts because then the heat of the coals would be trapped by the skirts and it would get nice and warm so it's a typical thing for women to use and that's why in painting and other cultural expressions it's often described as a woman's product and there are several occasions where they have a romantic significance for instance in this emblem by humor fisser published in 1614 in the text next to it it says that this is the best friend of women especially during winter and it's hard for a man to compete with it and only if he's a perfect gentleman he could be better than the warmth of a stove and that's why it's called the mignon de Dam which I guess would translate as best friend of women and you see stoves like this one in lots of paintings that have a romantic subject I made a video about that ages ago and I've put a link in the description but then again they are also just household objects they would be around in houses in pretty much any room including a kitchen so it's not out of place and behind it you can see a row of tiles those would be typical for dutch houses it was completely normal to have a plinth of tiles there and in delft it would be completely normal to have them with little blue pictures of death earthenware but you can see there on the left of the stove there's a little shape that some have seen as a little Cupid and I can see sort of a resemblance there because you can see a little bow shape to the right and that bulge on the left might be a wing but then again it might also be anything else but if you see Cupid right next to a stove that would pretty much tell us that there's a romantic meaning in this you would think wouldn't you so what do we make of this are we to think that this maid is having romantic thoughts she doesn't look like it it looks as though she's a very serious young woman focused on her work so perhaps it stresses that she has no time for the idiocy of men and that the stove will do for her just fine and interestingly enough we now know that this stove was placed there to replace what he had thought of before because of course these days we can look through all kinds of layers of paint with x-rays or infrared reflectology to name but a few of the modern techniques and that's how we now know that originally he had different plans for the background in the first instance he had placed a hamper with laundry next to her and there was some sort of object on the back wall perhaps a coat rack but that's not as clear to see and I love the fact that he removed them you see the hamper with laundry would have been a big object right next to her that would have altered the weight of the composition but more importantly it would have taken the calm and the Stillness out of the picture because then we would see that she was just doing this temporarily and that she had to hurry because she had to go on and do the laundry without the hamper somehow time stands still there's no hurry but then of course he needed to place something there and it became a stove and some dirt on the floor and that makes the room more messy with more imperfections and that in turn makes her somehow more dignified and the fact that he removed whatever was on the back wall I think is a stroke of Genius because it uncloths the picture and makes his Focus much more on her and being a perfectionist he then filled it with the little bumps and holes and Imperfections that make it such an interesting thing to look at I think also it gives it that perfect background where you can see how gradually he has that light change along the wall from the shade in the corner to the brightness to the right and all of that with a girl that seems to epitomize Dutch virtue so it's nice to see that she became one of the things people associate so much with the Netherlands like tulips and wooden shoes and windmills and of course girls pouring milk and so you find her on lots of merchandising of which this one is my favorite apparently you can buy it in the museum shop of the reaction gym but it almost didn't make it to the museum you see in the 19th century it was owned by the six family a prominent family in Amsterdam that had accumulated a very good collection of art over the centuries and they displayed it in one of their houses on the here and its last owner had made a gentleman's agreement that 39 of his paintings would be sold to the Rex Museum upon his death but when he died in 1905 the museum had nowhere near enough money to buy them even though they were offered at a very reasonable price so the government was asked to pay about two-thirds of that price and initially they hesitated and it led to a pretty public debate about the merits of Art and whether or not the state should own it or pay for it and the opposition was actually led by an art dealer who wanted to sell it to an American collector and oddly that sealed the deal when it came out that this painting in particular would leave the country if the government didn't provide the funds for the museum to buy it the government was persuaded that they should these are cartoons from a newspaper from 1907 when all of this played out and that's how she's still in the Netherlands and in the garage Museum so if you want to see her that's where you have to go and if you do plan on visiting the Netherlands make sure to let me know perhaps you can come to one of my lectures perhaps you could even book me for a tour who knows anyways as always thank you very much for watching and I hope to see you again soon bye [Music]

Channel: Stories Of Art

Views: 10,927

Keywords: Vermeer, johannes vermeer, het melkmeisje, the milkmaid, jan vermeer, johannes vermeer paintings, rijksmuseum, rijksmuseum amsterdam, vermeer tentoonstelling, carel huydecoper, stories of art, secret knowledge, perspective, perspective drawing, dutch golden age, golden age painting

Id: y99qHu1PhLU

Length: 26min 16sec (1576 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 12 2023