A good place to start an interpretation of Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” is to ask why he left the wall blank. That is not his usual procedure. Vermeer is inclined to fill walls with maps and other decorations that bring the outside world into the confines of the room that makes up his canvas so as to show how the two, the private and the public worlds, reflect and refract on one another, the house as a realm of the private while the public life of the Netherlanders stretched around the world. It is widely noted that Vermeer had originally painted a map on the wall in “the Milkmaid” only to paint it over. Why?
The wall he finally presents is not truly blank. It has an uneven surface that allows the light coming through the window to be reflected slightly differently at curves of greater thickness along the wall. That creates a wall that is shaped by long curved lines of shadow, as best I can make out, rather than by little “hills” of mottled color. The uneven whites are the result of a fidelity to how a rushed or imperfect job of white wash or plastering might show itself. So the realism of how a wall looks allows a viewer to look at that wall for a long time and see shadings and divided areas as would become customary after Turner. The wall therefore takes up space on its own, without additional adornment. So much, Vermeer seems to be saying, for traditional iconography. You don’t need symbols or even representations to fill the eye.
Another feature of this wall is that there are holes and studs placed in it, as if for pictures and objects now gone or not yet there. Rather than this being a meditation on the presence of absence (though that would work too), it is a substitute for maps as a way to create a relation between the room and what is outside the room. The wall provides a narrative for the painting. A family is either moving in or moving out or maybe just doing the early modern equivalent of remodeling, which was indeed an event in the daily life of Dutch cities. Things have either been taken down from the walls or new things are awaiting being put up on the walls once a proper whitewash is done. The old nails are in place, either to be removed or reused.
Once you know that, the task of the milkmaid who is portrayed in the picture becomes clear. She is preparing a makeshift meal to be consumed while the house is in disrepair. She is either doing what the art historians say, which is making a kind of bread porridge that does not require cooking, or else is just pouring the milk that is to be served along with the bread that is available on the table. There are no cheeses to go along with the bread, or at least none are in evidence, and so people are thought to be willing to make do with milk and bread. (Uncooked milk was supposed to be unhealthy, but serving it may be a sign of how rushed this meal was or evidence that the boiling of milk was a precaution not always taken.)
That leads to the milkmaid herself. She is hefty and plain and ruddy faced. Nor is the milkmaid very elegantly dressed. All these details suggest she is only a milkmaid—or perhaps, more accurately, an under maid who has been drafted into helping make do for the family while work is done on the house. As usual, Vermeer captures a particular moment in social or historical time and its attendant state of mind rather than only a continuous moment of feeling; he is grounded in actuality rather than in psychology. He captures everyday doings rather than everyday feelings and so allows himself to find quite extraordinary feelings in the moments he displays. Portraiture sometimes does that, less concerned with the faces and more concerned with the rendering of posture and the provenance of those portrayed, as in Gainsborough, or all three, as in Sargent.
The portrayal of the milkmaid as so ordinary might seem to be a joke. She is hardly as interesting as, let us say, the girl with the pearl earring, who becomes a touchstone of beauty. But this milkmaid does not simply sink into her role. She is poised and hovering over her task; her face is attentive even if not very pleasant to look at. She is very much engaged in the moment: doing what she is doing and giving off all the clues of body language that allow an observer to know that: her posture, her expression, the delicacy of her movements. And that is a major accomplishment, because we take from the picture a sense of how this young woman looks when she is concentrating even though, of course, we have never seen the woman before and so do no have any basis of comparison to other postures and expressions, only the knowledge that the milkmaid, like people in life, adapt their postures and expressions to the occasions that are at hand. Milkmaids are never just milkmaids; they are people employed as milkmaids. And milkmaids are never just doing what milkmaids do; they are doing one of the many things that milkmaids, in the ordinary course of the day, are asked to do, and in the way that this particular person does things. Vermeer captures all of that.
So what is she doing? She is presiding over a kind of ceremony, as has often been noted. The ceremony is a quotidian version of the pouring of wine with bread, and so is a kind of Protestant Mass, this time at the heart of a Dutch home. You might think she is too ordinary to take on this religious task even after it has been shorn of its visible supernatural trappings. There are no angels, no priestly vestments, nor any of the other trappings that would be found in Mediterranean paintings. Yet, think about it. If she were unclothed, she would be a Rubens nude, and therefore a mythological figure rather than a figure out of ordinary life. That she is clothed becomes, upon reflection, the startling thing about her. In another vocabulary, her natural state would be as unclothed. She is, like an angel, an agent of change, operating at the bidding of another who remains unseen. Among other things, that makes her not subject to usual standards of beauty; her plainness can be taken as a substitute for clouding over what makes a face human: its distinctiveness. She brings about the pouring of the milk and is one of the forces that help move forward the changes in the house as a whole, like so many little rodents who, in the Disney movie, create a dress for Cinderella. Here we witness the action that goes on behind the scenes, moving it along, the family not focused on what goes on in the farthest room or beneath the stairs, although knowing, of course, that somebody is going about doing this business.
What is this unseen action that is yet known by everyone to take place and to have taken place but only in genre paintings thought to be worth displaying? The true subject of the picture is another event that is often seen but rarely noticed. The milkmaid is bent over so as to pour milk. The milkmaid is the servant of that act, as is indicated by her bending over in a way that is a supplication and a respectful bow as well a way to make sure the milk does not spill. Vermeer makes the pouring take up the dramatic center of the picture, slightly to the left and below the actual center. The poured milk sets off the zones of the picture. To the left and below are a set of objects, including the bread, which might otherwise be objects grouped for a still life. To the right and above and beyond the milkmaid herself is only that empty wall, now infernal because its shifts of shading and lack of objects for contemplation is in such contrast with the objects that are immediately taken in as recognizable, as named and utilitarian things that have a place in our ordinary consideration of the furniture of everyday life. Objects have an existence within the scale of ordinary life; the texture of walls does not, operating on a different scale of perception that, most of the time, walking through life, we can neglect. If, on the other hand, you neglect items like bread and milk, you do not eat.
The rendering of the pouring is exquisite. The stream is very thin and watery so that you can see through it to the pitcher and the cooking dish, even as part of the stream at the left of the lip of the pitcher is thicker. Yet the stream curves just the way real streams of liquid do. It also catches the light yet does not refract it, which is more true to life than would be the case if the stream had become an excuse for a prismatic or other spectacular effect. The dramatic point of this presentation, though, is grander than its mere visual accuracy and intensity. The pouring is the final encapsulation of the picture’s theme of change because it is the most enclosed one, drawing down into itself the change represented by the almost bare wall, which shows change in a life, and the milkmaid, who shows the change in a role that can transform a person, and the change in the bread and milk into the bread and wine that shows the change from the actual to the symbolic. This change is the metaphysical one summed up by the idea of movement itself, that as Heraclitus put it, you cannot step but once into the same stream. The milk poured moves on and yet the representation of it remains the same, an allusion to the idea of change as something that remains constant as an idea even as it stands in place of what is always changing. How could such a paradox be? That is not for the picture to resolve, only pose.
The true point of comparison with this Vermeer painting is not Rubens or other painters that use the same elements within the painting or vary them in some way that makes them objects for a theory of iconography. Rather, “The Milkmaid” is a rejection of the iconographic reading that is so usual with Vermeer, symbol mongering taken as the sign of the picture’s depth, when what makes a Vermeer so breathtaking has little to do with that but more with the atmosphere it conveys. That is certainly the case here with its representation of a transitory moment that is often neglected as a topic of representation, the construction of the place that will bear representation as an interior of Dutch life.
The valid object of comparison is the Seventeenth Century painters concerned with light, Georges de La Tour most prominent among them, who give vision to their dark spiritual concerns by surrounding a particular source of illumination with a very dark background so as to point out the spiritual nature of a flame, that a flame, as the Kabala said at the time, crossed the divide between materiality and spirituality by moving through gradations of color. Now, de La Tour is not much given to show how blue light changes to white light. But he is very much concerned about variations in the color of white hot light as that is occasionally modified or “sullied” by a touch of red in the flame.
The picture to compare to “The Milkmaid” is Georges de La Tour’s “The Penitent Magdalene”. Forget about the religious topic of the painting and concentrate on how de La Tour, the French painter of the generation before Vermeer, surrounds the light of the candle, the light serving as a source of illumination. That is very different from using a point outside the painting as the source of light that is inferred from the shadows cast within the painting by that source. The Magdalene hovers close to the flame and so her face, in profile, is illuminated by it in a way that makes it a kind of death mask. More important to the structure of the painting is that most of the area to the right of the flame is dark to the point of an abstract expressionist patch of black. That right hand upper quadrant is the equivalent of the white washed wall in the right upper quadrant of the “Milkmaid”. It creates a sense of emptiness; it creates an imbalance with the rest of the painting.
The difference between the two, though, is not just that de la Tour is using negative space while Vermeer is not; the main difference is that de la Tour is using black versus light to create his spectacular effects while Vermeer is using the pouring of milk, which is, after all, white, to set off the white space, the space of the same color, that is over the milkmaid’s shoulder. So Vermeer is engaged in a game of one upmanship in that he is performing the more difficult visual feat, whether or not he was aware that de La Tour was also playing around with the same sets of visual elements. Trying to create an effect by using ever more limited resources is not an unusual artistic endeavor. Ravel did it with “Bolero”, geometers do it with points and strings, and Picasso did it by limiting “Guernica” to black and white. And yet the significance of the difference between the two paintings is more than a matter of technique, although technique points to it. The difference is that de La Tour is creating a mood, one that is quite complex, about religious feeling. In this case, religious feeling combines a sense of death with a sense of wonder. Vermeer touts, instead, the vividness of ordinary life which, if brought out from behind the curtain that is taken to shroud the religious world, can provide a substitute for it, people lost in the pouring of milk as well as in the maintenance of a family as well as in the larger world outside the home.
“The Milkmaid”, whatever its philosophical ramifications and technical ingenuity, has many limitations as a painting. It is neither pretty nor dazzling in its effects. There are no intricate maps or designs on the walls, no sparkling light effects. The composition is more a joke on what pictorial composition should be rather than a fresh angle on how to put a picture together. The painting is not dramatic and the milkmaid is not intriguing nor even particularly interesting. And so it remains to be explained why “The Milkmaid” is so well regarded a painting, both when it was first sold and now.
The historical question of why a painting appeals to a public is different from the formal question of what there is about a painting that might earn a certain aesthetic response. Class analysis does not provide much of an answer to the latter question, but it is of considerable help in addressing the former question. The appeal of “The Milkmaid” is to the kind of market a bourgeois painter attracts. The bourgeois look for something easy they can get hold of to justify their expenditure of money, given that the bourgeois, in both Moliere’s and Matthew Arnold’s times, were generally uneducated in their tastes, and so would turn to the most conventionalized of pleasures to be taken from art works. The bourgeois would therefore see in “The Milkmaid” what later critics see in it: a play on a genre painting and so meant to evoke sexuality, though there is hardly much that is erotic about the painting. The bourgeois purchaser will see something else, which is that this painting is a bit more elusive than a simple genre painting would be, and so that gives it a luster of seriousness, and so justifies placing it on the wall of a dignified residence. Such are the games the bourgeois play: they notice enough to feign having better taste than they do. And so Vermeer makes a sale of a far weaker painting than he usually paints.
The situation of the bourgeois purchaser, bear in mind, is far different from that of the art patron who is a member of a royal court and who is looking for art that is in some sense authorized. There is no need for a formal license, or for the approbation of a court official. A work of art authorizes itself, as it were, by attending to a subject matter which is flattering of the legitimacy of social hierarchy even by merely presuming it. To own such a painting is to genuflect before the king. Anyone who purchased a Poussin knew full well that the painting was not just pleasing; it was also solidly supportive of royal and other forms of hierarchy. The new bourgeois audience, on the other hand, was pleasing only itself, was out for the aggrandizement of its own egos, not genuflection to the state. That is what is so refreshing about paintings done in the Dutch Republic.