Vermeer's First Masterpiece: The Milkmaid

Who was Vermeer? And why is his painting of a humble kitchen maid considered one of the greatest achievements of the Dutch Golden Age? Is The Milkmaid laden with hidden religious and erotic meanings, or simply a perfectly realised depiction of everyday life? Join Alastair and James as they unravel the many mysteries of Vermeer's first masterpiece. If you want to see the artworks discussed in this episode you can switch on video in your podcast app at any time. Artworks in this episode: Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, 1657-58, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Gerard ter Borch, The Letter, 1660-65, The Royal Collection, London Jan Steen, The Feast of St. Nicholas, 1663-65, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Carel Fabritius, A View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller's Stall, 1652, The National Gallery, London Johannes Vermeer, Saint Praxedis, c.1655, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo Johannes Vermeer, The Procuress, 1656, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden Johannes Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, c. 1657-59, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden Domenico Fiasella, Queen Artemisia, c. 1645, Private Collection For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram and Laura Sovilla Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac 00:00 Introduction: The Milkmaid 05:35 The Dutch Golden Age and Delft 08:57 Vermeer's Early Life and Family 21:51 Vermeer's Early Works 28:19 Analyzing The Milkmaid 45:22 Meaning and Interpretation 1:02:41 The 1660s: Vermeer at His Peak 1:03:31 The Disaster Year and Vermeer's Death

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm Alastair Sooke.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  And I'm James Fox.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Inside a stark room, before a whitewashed wall speckled with nail holes, and beneath a broken window through which light is flooding in, an ordinary woman, a kitchen maid, performs a mundane chore. Dressed in a white linen cap, a yellow leather bodice with sleeves that have been pushed up to reveal just this little flash of pale skin on her forearms, and a glorious apron that's the same shade of ultramarine as the Virgin Mary's robes. She's a burly lass, this maid, concentrating hard upon her task, because very carefully, with steady hands, she's pouring this trickle of thick,

• 0:50Speaker 00

  creamy milk from an earthenware pitcher into a basin that's surrounded by crusty pieces of bread, sparkling like treasure, on a table. So that, James, is obviously my brief description of The Milk Maid, painted by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, likely in the late 1650s, which today can be found in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. It's a very simple scene, tranquil, contemplative, serene. But none the script? I don't think so, no way, because there is something radiant, even transcendent, possibly religious, you could say, about Vermeer's depiction of this supposedly hundra moment, which is going to be the focus of today's episode.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Something that, almost 370 years after it was painted, in the city of Delft, still resonates. What do you think makes this painting so very special, James?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Alistair, there aren't many perfect pictures in the history of art. There are many beautiful pictures, there are many gripping pictures, there are many unforgettable pictures, but I think this is a perfect picture. Everything about it is so exquisitely poised, balanced, calibrated. The relationship between the light and the dark, the positive and negative space, the colours. It's absolutely stunning, isn't it?

• 2:07Speaker 00

  It's so gorgeous, and because of that, it merits a whole episode to itself.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  It comes in a very interesting moment in Vermeer's career. It's a real sort of threshold work, this transition between his early work, which to some people might be less familiar, and his mature work that we associate him with, with these contemplative scenes, with a single figure often, light flooding in, and very, very peaceful. And they do appeal to modern tastes. I can't help thinking, when I look at this picture, of there was this unbelievable exhibition at the Rijksmuseum just a few years ago, when was it, 2023? And I was lucky enough to go and review it, which was an exhibition of Vermeer's work. And they pulled together just an incredible number of his paintings. It was, I'm aware that as a journalist, it's this sort of risk of journalistic hyperbole,

• 2:57Speaker 00

  it really was probably a sort of defining aesthetic experience of certainly my career, this profound cultural moment, because, you know, art historians talk about, there are what, maybe 37 paintings that they generally agree that survived that were by Vermeer? And one of those was stolen from Boston some years ago, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, hasn't been recovered. So there are only really 36 that we know about, clearly he probably painted more. And of those, the Rijksmuseum had gathered 28. Did you, you've seen the catalogue, I think?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  I have seen the catalogue. You know, a few weeks ago, we did a series about Michelangelo, and you confessed that you had never seen Michelangelo as David in the flesh. Well, it's my turn.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Ah!

• 3:41Speaker 01

  I did not go to see that exhibition. It's a source of great personal shame.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Terrible shame, yeah.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  I don't know why. I think I had intended to go, I think I was too busy. I can't remember why I ended up not going. To my defence, though, I have seen most of Vermeer's paintings in the flesh. We're very lucky in London that we have four of them, so we have, what, more than 10% of his total output. But it's a great shame. Was it one of the best exhibitions you've ever seen?

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Well, I think one of the things about it is that it actually resituated Vermeer and challenged lots of preconceptions, maybe we have, about him. One of which is that he was his artist that after his death was sort of totally forgotten, was in obscurity, and then rediscovered in the 19th century, when, I think it was a French journalist used this very evocative phrase, referred to him as "the Sphinx of Delft", referring to the Dutch city in which he was born, where he worked. And there is this idea still that he's a totally enigmatic artist. And The Milk Maid is an enigmatic painting, but...

• 4:39Speaker 01

  He is pretty enigmatic.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  He is pretty enigmatic, but there's been a tremendous amount of research in the intervening decades since that so-called rediscovery was made has taken place. And although there are, you know, there's no diary, which would be wonderful to hear what Vermeer had to say about art and life, there are a number of sources that scholars have found, and they've fleshed out a bigger picture of his world, which hopefully we can draw upon and evoke before we get stuck into some proper discussion of The Milk Maid itself.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  But as you say, one of the things that is so remarkable about Vermeer is that he produced so few pictures. He produced 40 or 50 probably in his entire life. As you say, 37 made their way through to the 20th century. And that makes every single one of them a priceless treasure. And we are going to focus in this episode on one of those paintings, The Milk Maid.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Before, Alistair, we plunge into Vermeer's famous jug of milk. I think we need to talk a little bit about the man who made it and the world in which he moved. So Vermeer lived in the Netherlands in the 17th century, in a period known as the Dutch Golden Age, extraordinary period of European history that extends from about 1588 through to 1672. A period when, after eventually gaining independence from the Spanish, the Dutch Republic is formed. And the Dutch Republic is in many ways, it's the first modern society. It's modern because it's urban, it's very middle class, it's very capitalist, it's quite tolerant by the standards of the day, and it's globalised. Dutch traders are trading with the entire world, from the Americas in the West through to Indonesia and Japan in the East.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And the Dutch Republic is full of extremely wealthy, acquisitive, art-loving people. So there's a massive unprecedented boom in art. One historian estimated that during the Dutch Golden Age, 10 million paintings were produced.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Wow, is it that high?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  And because these paintings were being made for middle-class people, rather than churches and cathedrals and kings and queens, we get a new kind of art. We get some of the first landscape paintings, the first still-life paintings, the first genre scenes with the scenes of everyday life. And so many, many artists really flourish in this scene, some of the greatest Dutch artists in history, Rembrandt and Frans Hals. The centre of the Dutch Republic is Amsterdam, the capital is The Hague. But Vermeer lives in a little town on the outskirts of The Hague called Delft.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  So Delft is quite, it's still quite a prominent city within the Dutch Republic, and quite a prosperous place. I think the big industries there were textiles, which may be relevant in a moment when we think about Vermeer's dad and what he did, but also brewing beer, and later, the famous Delftware, which is that tin-glazed ceramics.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Blue and white?

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Blue and white, imitating all of this Chinese porcelain that, thanks to this new internationalist outlook that you've described, was flooding into the country and there was a market for that. So that becomes something which, later in the 17th century, brings a lot of money into the city. But it was famous for being, in typical Dutch fashion, ordered.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Quite clean place. Often in the sources, cleanliness seems to come up a lot. So there's a network of canals.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Of course there is.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  There's a fortified wall that goes around, you know, you can imagine looking at them. It's not huge, maybe about sort of 1.3 kilometres by 750 metres. And there's this skyline where you can see church spires, there's an old church and a new church. And this is the setting in which Vermeer is born in 1632. And I think the point about its size is important to keep in mind, because there are a number of people who crop up in his life, who are very important, who probably know him.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  From when he was really very young, just playing about in the streets. Most of his life, to begin with, I mean, not at the very start, but centres on the central marketplace in Delft. And this was a hub. So you can imagine all of this population, his future patrons, are people that when he's, what, before he's even a teenager, is probably, he's made their acquaintance.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he's born, as you say, in the autumn of 1632. His parents, and this is a fact that's always tickled me, his parents run a pub. They have a pub called The Flying Fox on a canal in the centre of Delft. And the name is not an accident, and this is one of the many reasons why I love Vermeer, is that he was born with the informal surname Fox. He had the same surname as me.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  I hadn't even thought about this.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a fox, just like me.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  I have to say, I thought you might like this. I got myself into a slight tangle whilst prepping for this episode, because Dutch pronunciations are not great, and I have traumatic memories of, my mother is Dutch, of butchering Dutch pronunciations left, right and centre. So I thought I should send her a list of names. And one of them is the Dutch name of this pub.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Oh, go on then.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  She sent me a voice note, which I thought you might like to hear, so you can actually hear what it was, how to pronounce it in Dutch.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Let's hear it.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Which is, let's see if we can get the right one.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Deflicte de Fosse.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Deflicte de Fosse.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Deflicte de Fosse.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  That is lovely. That is lovely. Of course, unfortunately, they don't spend that much time in the Flying Fox because when Vermeer is eight or nine, they move to an even bigger pub called the Mechelen.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, what, do you know anything about the name of that pub?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  No idea.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  But this is, my understanding is that he does a number of things, the dad, doesn't he? One of them is that he has a link with, there's a textile industry, we're producing something called Kaffa.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  They're running the pub, but also crucially, he is a sort of art dealer.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Not sort of, he's a proper, he is a proper art dealer. So I'm pretty certain that there would have been paintings for sale on the walls of the Flying Fox and the subsequent pub, the Mechelen. And I like to speculate, we know nothing about Vermeer's childhood, of course, I like to speculate that the young Vermeer, who is probably, you know, polishing a tankard or sweeping the floors, that one day he sees an artist comes, come in and thinks, that's what I'm gonna do.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  We don't know anything about his education, but we do know there was an art academy two doors away from the pub.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Right, so quite a modest institution, but nevertheless, a place where you could learn the basics.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  So he could have possibly gone there, we don't know for certain, as I say. What we do think is that probably aged 10 or 11, he would have embarked on an apprenticeship with an artist. We don't know the master, although Vermeer's father was probably very well connected within the art world and so probably it was a pretty good match. But really, Vermeer completely vanishes from the historical record after his baptism. He only returns to the historical record in 1653.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  I mean, it's one of the great mysteries in art history because people are desperate to know where he went and who taught him. Because some of the options are home schooled, but he disappears, so he's probably travelling outside of Delft. I mean, one of the things to say about Dutch cities at this time is they are extraordinarily well connected. Thanks to these waterways, this network of canals, you could have a sort of horse drawn boat that could get you from Delft to Rotterdam within a couple of hours.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the country's small, isn't it?

• 11:49Speaker 00

  And the country's small. So as a result, you have to imagine that whilst people, historians, pedantic types, really want to see everything evidenced in documents, it's highly likely that there's a lot of fluidity and travelling around. The big other question, aside from whether he maybe went to, say, Utrecht, which was a centre for artists who had been, Dutch artists who travelled to Italy and were inspired by Caravaggio and some of Vermeer's early work seems to show that influence. The other option is, did he actually make it to Italy himself? I mean, do you have a hunch?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  We have no idea.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  We just don't know.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  We have no idea. Some people have suggested that an artist called Gerard Terboch might have been his master.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  I mean, he's, he's an unbelievably good artist.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  One of the most, I think, undervalued artists in the history of art.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Brilliant at painting satin.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, one of the best.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  Which sounds a bit random, but it's gorgeous when you look at it.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  One of the very, very best and not someone who is widely known in the outside world. But anyway, Vermeer probably does complete his apprenticeship and as I say, he's completely absent from the historical record until he turns 20, until 1653, which is quite an eventful year for him. Because in the first half of the year, 1653, when he's still 20, he falls in love. Falls in love with a girl called Katharina Bolnes and proposes. But her mother, who's a very important character in Vermeer's life and in this episode, a woman called Maria Thins, she's not that keen on the marriage.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Well, the thing we haven't really outlined is the religious context. So Vermeer is born into reformed Protestant family. And Katharina comes from a Catholic family. And Maria, his future mother-in-law, also comes from a very prosperous family, which I think derived a lot of wealth from, is it the city of, oh god, where's my mum when I need a gouda, gouda?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Gouda, the cheese place.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Yes. And the point about that is that she came from a family of quite grand people. They'd been sort of mayors, burgomasters, whatever you want to call them, leaders, civic leaders. And she's probably, you know, this is speculation, but she's probably looking at Johannes Vermeer, the young Jan, and thinking, he comes from pretty humble beginnings.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  He's grown up at a pub.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  He's grown up in a pub and also he's not a Catholic.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  And so for those reasons. However, she doesn't totally oppose the marriage, does she?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  There's another reason why I think she's reluctant to agree to this marriage. It's a fascinating story. So Maria Thins has just emerged from a very abusive marriage of her own.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  She's married to this brickmaker in Gouda, the cheese place, and he is a wife beater. He's an awful, awful person. She has managed to annul the marriage and has escaped to Delft. So she's probably pretty down on men.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Probably pretty down on marriage. But Vermeer is really persistent and one of the strange documents that we have of his early life is that on the 4th of April, 1653, he, with some of his friends, goes round to Maria Thins' house to try to persuade her to agree to the marriage. And probably at this point, again, speculation, we don't know for certain, he probably agrees to convert to Catholicism in order to get that marriage over the line. And she does, she remains reluctant, but she doesn't stand in their way because two weeks later, I think on roughly the 20th of April, 1653, Vermeer marries Katharina Bolnes.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  And they'd definitely take a Catholic approach to having children, I would say.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  They're at it like rabbits.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  I mean, they have an unbelievable number of kids. I've got three, you've got two, that's a handful in each case, I'm sure. They end up having possibly 14 or 15 children in the course of their lives together.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  And by the time of Vermeer's death, I think there are 11 have survived.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  So there's tragedy in there as well because four die, either stillborn or very young.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  But, I mean, bloody hell, that's.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Unbelievable.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  You, you wonder why he doesn't paint so much.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Well, actually, you know, it's a, it's a great irony, isn't it, in Paradox of Vermeer, that Vermeer is the great master of the peaceful interior. But his house, if it's anything like my household, and as you say, I've only got two children, it must have been chaos in that house. A dozen children running up and down the stairs, into the rooms, out of the rooms, and yet he paints this unbelievable piece.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  It's almost like escape. I mean, there is actually a saying, still, I think it's current today in the Netherlands, which is, refers to a Jan Steen household. So there's another 17th century painter, Jan Steen. But he is famous for his quite anarchic scenes of exactly what you're describing. Rambustous, boisterous people, carousing, they're drunk, there's all sorts of family. I mean, they're really exciting pictures, they're nothing like as exquisitely painted as those by Vermeer. But I'd never quite thought about that. Of course, Vermeer's domestic life must have looked exactly like that.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Mayhem.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, and he's escaping it altogether.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely. He probably had a very strong lock on his studio door. But, but the other fact we know from 1653 is towards the end of the year, he registers as a professional artist at the local guild, the Guild of St Luke. So by the age of 21, by the end of 1653, Vermeer is up and running. He's married, he's a professional artist, he.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Can I give you a geeky little thing about the Guild of St Luke? One thing we know is how much he pays. Because when you join, you have to pay a certain amount.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  And scholars rather cleverly can extrapolate from this information. He pays in the end six guilders.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  But you would think, because his dad had been a member of this guild and because they're from Delft, he should, if he'd been an apprentice in Delft, have only paid three. Therefore, we know he pretty much must have spent time outside of Delft when he was an apprentice artist.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  That's fascinating. Well, anyway, he, he registers the end of 1653. He and his wife probably begin by living in the rooms above the Mechelen, but probably because of this, this extraordinary ability they have to produce offspring, they have to move to a larger place. And his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, who we've mentioned, she has a very big house across the way in Delft and they probably at some point in the 1650s move into that house. And we think, we know because there's a detailed inventory, that probably Vermeer had a studio on the first floor of that house, north facing room, and that's where he might have done some of his paintings. So probably as you move into 1653, 1654, Vermeer's feeling, you know, here we go, life's on the roll.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  I, I think things were on the up for them, you know, there, there were lots of prospects. They're probably making a little bit of money. He actually, when he enrolls in this guild, he is known as a master painter.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  But the thing we have forgotten to mention is very soon after he does embark on this career as a professional artist, a disaster, an unexpected disaster strikes Delft.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  This is an irresistible story. It's known retrospectively as the Delft Thunderclap. It's, it's really, it's actually a catastrophe. It's, it's a big deal for Delft at this moment. So one thing we haven't mentioned, in this city, it just so happens that in a former, the grounds of a former convent, the north east of the city, the Dutch had decided this would be a good place for something known as the Secret of Holland, which is basically where all of the, in fact, it was 80,000 or 90,000 pounds worth of gunpowder, which the Dutch Republic could use, was stored, along with materials that would have been used to manufacture it. And we know that on the morning of the 12th of October, 1654,

• 19:05Speaker 00

  there was a huge explosion. And this arsenal, all of this gunpowder went up and the detonation, the explosion could be heard miles, miles away from outside Delft. And it killed in one fell swoop, I think it was, what, more than 100 people?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  200 houses just immediately destroyed, another 300 properties totally damaged and had to be effectively rebuilt and repaired, stained glass windows in the churches shattered.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  Vermeer himself, he's, I think, 22 at this point, he survives. But, and interestingly, much like, as you say, with his domestic life versus his paintings, none of this great violent moment, this catastrophic moment in Delft's history, you don't really find it in the art. But there is a very sad subplot because there is an artist who is, should be a bit like Tabuch, much better known, called Carol Fabritius. And he was a pupil of Rembrandt, who is seen as the transition from Rembrandt to what becomes known as the School of Delft Painters, including Vermeer. He has also become an artist in the Guild of St Luke and he's in Delft and he gets killed. His studio goes up in smoke. As a result, lots of work is lost. His most famous picture is The Goldfinch.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Of the Donatart fame?

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Of the Donatart fame. And there are only really about a dozen pictures by him that survive. But one of the things he does is he goes from the much darker tonality of Rembrandt's work to something that's much lighter, more luminous, with a cooler palette and an interest in optics and lenses. You can see there's a very curious painting in the National Gallery by him here in London, which looks like it involved lenses in some way.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Oh, so weird, a person sitting overlooking a square.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  It really is odd, isn't it? And there are a number of things like that which people then correlate with Vermeer's work. And the assumption is that Vermeer is taking, learning from, possibly studying with, although actually Fabritius only joins the guild a couple of years, I think, earlier than him. Later, there is a poem written which commemorates Fabritius and basically says something along the lines of, "Vermeer is his successor within Delft." So making that link.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Well, Vermeer owns three paintings by Fabritius.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  So there was some connection. I mean, I know we're speculating, but this thunderclap can't have been good news for Vermeer. He's a young artist, just emerging. Artists then as now always depend on people having spare money. This is a massive economic disaster for Delft and people who might otherwise have been spending money on pictures are probably spending money rebuilding their own homes. So it's probably not great. But nevertheless, Vermeer embarks on this career and he starts experimenting with different styles. What do you think of Vermeer's early pictures? Because they're not very Vermeer-like, are they?

• 21:53Speaker 00

  No, I mean, this is one of the fascinating things about visiting the Reichs Museum show and seeing them together. And actually, obviously, lots of people maybe won't have seen the show. You can get hold of the catalogue. It's beautifully designed. And the reason I mention it is because very early on, if you open it up, they show pretty much all of Vermeer's paintings in, how do you term it, sort of like relative size. So they're reproduced in the book as if we saw them in reality, their scale is commensurate with each other. And some of those early pictures are really big. They depict biblical scenes. There's a mythological scene of Diana and her companions. There's a very strange painting now in Tokyo, which is called Saint Praxedis, which is

• 22:34Speaker 00

  probably a copy after a work by an Italian artist that I confess I don't really know, called Felice Vitorelli, who was possibly Florentine. So what he seems to be doing is he's inspired by Italian or Italianate art. And actually, jumping around, but we've been talking about the art dealer dad. There was an inventory of what the art dealer dad had. And in 1623, there's a little line, which is, one of the pictures was an Italian piper. So as I said, there was this sort of vogue earlier in the 17th century where Dutch artists are drawing upon, adapting, imitating Italian art. Vermeer seems to be doing exactly that in the 1650s. But it doesn't look like the Vermeer that we know at all.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Until the end of the 1650s, where you suddenly see this rapid transition. I mean, do you have a sense of why he suddenly changes his work then? I mean, we're building towards now, very close to the moment of The Milkmaid.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  It's very curious, isn't it? I think there's a very important document that exists that reveals a great deal indirectly. Because in 1657, so he's only a couple of years into his career, he gets loaned 200 guilders by a very wealthy couple in Delft. The man is called Peter van Raalven and his wife Maria. They are extremely wealthy. They have an enormous house in Delft called the Golden Eagle.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 23:58Speaker 01

  And people think that this loan is an advance on a painting.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Now, the reason this is important, Alastair, is Peter van Raalven and his wife, probably his wife actually takes the senior role in this, end up becoming Vermeer's major, perhaps even exclusive patrons. They commission many, many of his pictures. In fact, they have, I mean, you talk about the Reichs Museum collecting how many pictures in the exhibition?

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Well, they had 28, but this couple end up with pretty, almost that many.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  They have about 20 in their home. Can you imagine going into a private home in Delft in the 1660s and seeing 20 Vermeers in the bedrooms, in the bathroom, in the kitchen?

• 24:35Speaker 00

  There is a document which talks about, because these are probably inherited by this couple's daughter. And then she dies and her husband inherits the paintings and eventually he dies and they're sold at auction at the end of the 17th century. But there is this document that suggests how they were hung in the daughter's house. So you have hanging in the front room, eight paintings by Vermeer. And this is the detail I love.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  I'm imaginable.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  Three ditto, by the same, in boxes. So, you know.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  They hadn't even been hung.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Hadn't even hung them up. Four in the back room, one in the kitchen, two in the cellar, two more elsewhere in the house. I mean, it is quite an evocative image.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  But I think that they play a very important role in the development of Vermeer's art.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Do you think they're dictating it then? It's the patron's choice, almost.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  I think it's at that time, around 1657, that he starts to move away from these religious scenes, move away from these very explicitly moralising scenes. There's another picture called The Procures, which is quite a bizarre picture.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  Can we just have a moment with that?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Let's have a moment with The Procures.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Because I think this is building into a theme of this episode where you've been sort of evoking that unruly domestic household. In this scene, which is, what is it, a bordello brothel scene? It's actually, it's one of the things that came across again in this great show. It's a painting which is in Dresden and it's quite unsettling. You see essentially a sex worker and this man in red who's groping her and proffering a coin. There's someone who's looking on in a horribly voyeuristic fashion. And on the left, as we're looking at the painting, there is a man with a big black hat and a big lace collar, long hair.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  And awful brown teeth.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Awful brown teeth. He's looking at the viewer. He's got some beer. He has this unquestionably phallic part of a musical instrument, which he's clashing above the rug, which is on, I guess, on the table. By the way, my Dutch grandmother, she had rugs on the table, which is a tradition that comes from the 17th century. And this figure on the left is very likely a portrait, a self-portrait of Vermeer himself. We can't be sure about it, but traditionally art historians always imagine that this is a self-portrait because he's engaging the viewer so much.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  And it gives a sense of someone who, later in his life, he would be something known as a pike man within Delft. In other words, he's someone who was not this loner, painting these kind of immaculate pictures, which you can, it's easy to just confuse the art with the man. But here he seems to be this great roisterer.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  He's a likely lad.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  He is.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  But you know, what's very interesting is that he starts out making those pictures, but after he makes contact with Peter van Raalven and his wife, he starts to paint the quiet interiors for which he is famous. He paints a beautiful picture called Made Asleep, which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He paints another picture in Dresden called Girl Reading A Letter, which is probably the first Vermeer that really looks like a Vermeer. A woman standing, doing something meditative, the windows on the left, the lights coming in. It's a really interesting, it's not a perfect picture, but there are some beautiful parts of it. There's this reflection of her face on the glass, absolutely stunning. But I think, Alastair, his first actual masterpiece is The Milkmaid, which comes in around 1658, 1659.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  And we are going to be discussing that picture in forensic detail after the break.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Welcome back to Stories of Art and we are now going to discuss Vermeer's arguably first masterpiece, The Milkmaid, which is actually, Alastair, a misnomer because this is not a milkmaid.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  She's not a milkmaid, it's a kitchen maid. She is pouring milk from this earthenware pitcher into a basin. And we haven't, I've got to confess, we haven't really plotted this part of the conversation out.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  I was sort of thinking that maybe we should, we should describe the picture.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Maybe think about how it was painted and some of the compositional techniques, devices, things that are going on, before thinking about the significance of what it might mean and what it might represent.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  So, we're looking at a woman who, she is quite sturdy, she has this very thickly painted face, which is catching the light. As you've said, with that slightly earlier picture of a girl reading a letter, there is a window, again here on the left-hand side, which has this, if you look closely, there is a broken pane about two-thirds of the way up. And all of this light is coming into the painting and illuminating her with these radiant clothes, even though that she's just a humdrum domestic worker, as it were. And then there's this unbelievably stunning still life in front of her.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  So on that table, you can see, the jug is sort of pitched up so we can see the black void of it, and then there is this, it feels like it's the only movement in the painting, this trickle of this milk, and it does feel like it's thick, you get a sense of its creaminess.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  It's not semi-skimmed, is it?

• 29:54Speaker 00

  It's not semi-skimmed, which is going straight into the basement. And then around it, you have, there's a blue ceramic jug, which is probably a piece of German stoneware, which may well have kept beer, and then there's a lot of bread, I mean, a lot of bread, and it's all this sort of sparkling sunlight all over there, illuminating the bread.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I think what she's doing, she's doing what I do every single morning, she's making porridge.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I mean, I was thinking about this because I do the same, and I give it to my children, they complain. I think if I gave them a porridge which was made of some admittedly lovely milk, but stale bread and a few other ingredients, mashed it up and then go, that would be, it'd be total rebellion.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  That was the recipe for bread porridge, wasn't it? You took some stale bread, you broke it up, you can see she's got it on the table, you put it in the earthenware dish, you cover it with milk, that's what she's doing right now, then you heat it slowly until it becomes a stop, my children would absolutely love it.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  You think, oh, maybe we should...

• 30:43Speaker 01

  They complain if they don't get porridge.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  So, other elements in there which are important is that there is, behind her, there's this completely blank, or almost completely blank whitewashed wall, which is actually very scuffed. As I said at the start, you can see some nails protruding from it in places, or nail holes.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  I love that wall so much, I think it's one of the great achievements in the history of art, that wall.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Well, let's come back to that, because the wall is very important. But just to finish with some of the description, in the background, there is a wicker basket hanging on a wall, which is the same wall as the window on the left, which is probably the kind of thing you could take to market. There's a brass pail gleaming, and interestingly, this is, this is why this is, in part, such a transitional, important work for Vermeer. He's becoming obsessed with direct observation of natural light effects, and using light to unify the painting. So the light is coming through that window on the left, it's bouncing off the whitewashed wall behind the woman, and back on, you can see it, as it's then reflecting on the gleaming brass pail and one side of that basket, very clever. And then, final thing, just to think about in terms of description, because it's very

• 31:48Speaker 00

  important when we come to talk about the meaning of the work. Bottom right of the picture, behind the woman, you have some small details that get art historians exceptionally excited. There's a little row of, I mentioned the sort of delftware, delft tiles, there's a row of tiles, blue and white, which are running along like a sort of skirting board at the back of the floor, behind her, and three images are visible, two have been deciphered, and one, as far as I know, is still a mystery. So you have Cupid with his bow, and a man with a walking stick and a knapsack, probably a traveller. And then in front of that, there's a, what looks like a sort of wooden box with holes in the lid, which is actually a foot warmer, which you could essentially put hot coals

• 32:33Speaker 00

  in, so if you're in a, if you're in a room without a hearth, without a fire, and it's cold, and maybe this was a cold room, maybe it's associated somehow with a dairy, that's speculation, women, traditionally, this is, they were associated with these things, could take these foot warmers and put them beneath their skirts and keep themselves very warm in the cold. So that's a sort of description, just simply of what we see. In terms of pictorial effects, I mean, you've mentioned the wall, should we, do you want to talk about the wall?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  I love the wall, I think, honestly, I think it's one of the greatest things in the history of art, I could look at it for hours, the dent, the marks, the scuffs, the cracks, and best of all, you've mentioned this already, there's a little nail that casts a tiny triangular shadow in the direction of the maid herself. Vermeer must have spent weeks painting that wall, and you just think, how many people before him, in the history of art, how many people since him have spent weeks painting a crumbling kitchen wall?

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  It's incredible.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Can I, can I tell you a couple of things I love about the wall, myself?

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  One is that, because there is this idea with Vermeer, and we may come on to this...

• 33:37Speaker 01

  I think we're going to lose all our listeners just talking about a wall for 20 minutes.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  This is the best bit, this is the magic. There's, there's, there is this idea with Vermeer that he loves, that he uses lenses...

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  And that somehow, he's able to just simply transcribe with the use of these tools, and we can come on to this, it's a bigger conversation, maybe in a future episode, we'll look at this idea in proper depth. But, if you look at the wall, on the left-hand side, it's very dark and shadowed, on the left, as we're looking at that woman. On the right-hand side, it's really quite bright. Artistic compositional device, choice, a conscious decision. What it means is that she can stand out enormously tangibly and sculpturally against the background, because her right hand, which is illuminated by light, the one, her hands which are pouring that pitcher, they are offset by the dark shadow of the wall.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  And then on the other side, where she's actually, is the shadow, because of course, that's the side which is away from the window, the wall is really light to offset it. And he, even, if you look really closely, down her left kind of shoulder and arm, Vermeer has added just a tiny white contour line, which just allows it to sing, and again, makes it very, very crisp. There's also something else going on with the wall, which I think is important. He originally filled that wall with other stuff.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  So there was going to be a rack with lots of jugs behind her head. Now, at some point in painting this, he's got rid of that. You know, scholars, art historians, rather, can use various technological things to see what's beneath the layer of the paint, and they've sort of discovered this. And it was the same in that bottom corner. Instead of a foot warmer, there was going to be something that looked a bit like a wicker cradle for, possibly for a baby, although actually, it wasn't that, was it?

• 35:26Speaker 01

  I think it was a fire, I think people for a long time thought it was a laundry basket, but actually, I think it's something called a fire basket.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  A fire basket, yeah, which again, similar idea, portable heat.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  So, I think that by doing that, he is simplifying his composition, which is moving towards minimalist Vermeer that we sort of know, which again, you mentioned that painting from a little bit earlier, the girl reading the letter, there, there's a big, isn't there a big curtain in the foreground? There are more props to define the space. He's getting rid of that stuff and simplifying here. But he's also using that as a way of making this figure more monumental.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  It's sensational, isn't it? I mean, I keep coming back to the thought that he paints this, what, 1658, 1659? He's like 25 years old.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  God, that's sickening.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  When he paints his picture, sickening. I mean, when I think what I was doing when I was 25 years old, but this reads like the picture of a mature artist.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  It reads like a picture of someone who's been at this for decades. He is in his mid-20s.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, because it's not jazz hands, if anything, it's sort of, it's reducing things, which is, which is a very mature device. There's something else to be said about the perspective here, which is very interesting. Vermeer is becoming obsessed with perspective. He's probably influenced in this by another artist working in Delft at that time, called Peter de Huyghe. And he was famous for transcribing that, again, that sort of sense of luminosity in a scene, but also using very correct perspective. And there is, above the maid's right hand, you can identify the place where he put a pin...

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Which is the vanishing point of all of the perspective lines, where they would converge in this composition. And the likely way he would have painted it is from this pin, taken coloured threads and strapped them down onto the support, to work out where all of those lines of perspective should correctly go within the composition, and to plan the work. And the reason that's more than technically interesting, is because it's a very low vanishing point.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  So it's as if we're perhaps sitting...

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  As the viewer, looking actually slightly up at this figure, who herself, people often talk about this sort of pyramidal build-up of forms, that you have that still life on the left, leading up to her head, which again, enhances perhaps, the sense of monumentality, the sense of dignity with which instinctively you feel she's imbued.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  While we're talking about technique, it's something you raised very briefly, I think we should have a little discussion about this, because when people talk about Vermeer's technique, they always talk about optical devices.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  They always talk about lenses, they always talk about the camera obscura. Lots of people have done this, including David Hockney, the late David Hockney, and I think it's worth having that conversation.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  I'm very persuaded by it. I'm very persuaded when it comes to Vermeer, that he is using lenses of some form. I think there are two reasons for thinking this when it comes to Vermeer. First of all, we know that one of the great lensmakers of the entire Dutch Republic lived exactly next door to Vermeer. It was a man called Anthony van Loevenhuk. And they actually were friends, because we know that Anthony van Loevenhuk actually was an executor of Vermeer's will after he died. So it seems to be very likely...

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  That Vermeer would have stepped next door, gone inside, had a look at some lenses, perhaps been demonstrated how to use them by van Loevenhuk.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  I mean, later he does paint the astronomer, Vermeer, doesn't he?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, exactly. So he's obviously aware of these kinds of things that are taking place in science, in optics, in technology. But I think the real reason I'm persuaded that he is using optical devices is in the picture itself.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  And there are two telltale signs.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  The first telltale sign, you've mentioned the brass or the copper pail at the back against the wall. Have a look at that, and have a look at the front of the basket in the foreground. What do you notice about those?

• 39:25Speaker 00

  I'm trying to zoom in, it's taking a long time, so tell me what I noticed.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  They are out of focus.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  They are blurred. Now, no one would see a blur with the naked eye.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  You only notice things that are out of focus if you're looking through a lens.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  And so I think that's a crucial sign that Vermeer is using lenses. The other real telltale sign is if you look at that stunning, you've mentioned it already, the stunning still life in the foreground. If you zoom in very close, and hopefully we can do this for viewers of the podcast, you'll see there are all these little dots of light. They're called pointillés, all over the bread and the basket. And again, that is not something you would see with the naked eye.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Can I say about the bread? Because I find this interesting, hugely interesting, and I don't discount what you say at all. I think instinctively, I'm probably almost down the road of being persuaded, but not quite. I think he undeniably has an interest in lenses and optics. The idea of the camera obscura, it's probably worth spelling out, you know, the simplest form is it's a very dark room with, on one wall, there's just a pinhole. And that allows rays of light to come through and something through the quirk of the way that works, I'm no physicist, means that the image that's on the other side, that the light is carrying it effectively, is inverted, but appears projected on the wall, on the other side of the pinhole.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  And around this time, there is this gradual development of camera obscura begins being something very big. It ends up being something quite portable. Artists are clearly interested in using it in some way. There is no camera obscura in the inventory of Vermeer's possessions at his death. And the specific point about the so-called pointillé of the bread is very interesting because what you're describing, I think the technical term for it is halations, which are these, that sort of blurred effect of light. You would find it if you're looking at an image projected via a lens, specifically with gleaming metallic surfaces. You do not find halations. If you were looking at this image of bread via the camera obscura via a lens, you wouldn't see the halations.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  So for some reason, he's deciding to imitate that. I'm sure he's aware of that effect through lenses. But I suppose my bigger thought is that whilst, and maybe this is very conservative on my part, whilst historically art historians were quite reluctant to accept the whole lens debate, I still have a vestigial reluctance on the basis of, I'm sure it was being used as a tool. But if people imagine that essentially he is simply replicating reality in this sort of almost quasi-photographic fashion by using something like the camera obscura, that's manifestly not the case. We've already described, even if you look at the wall, I mean, the dark side on the left, if you look underneath her right hand,

• 42:10Speaker 00

  the area, tiny little bit of wall around the picture, he suddenly flicks to light because that helps again to bring forward those objects. The halations or the pointillé in the bread, they almost form this abstract passage of painting. And perhaps they're there as well to signify the texture, the crustiness of the bread. So I think it's still a sort of, it's not a vexed topic, it's a very interesting topic, but it's a complex one.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Let me respond to that in two ways. First of all, I'm not suggesting that he actually painted this with a camera obscura. But I think it's very likely that he had been shown the world through these lenses and had noticed halations, had noticed these bits that are in and out of focus and thought, this is really useful as a stylistic trait. So I think he's probably borrowing the aesthetics of looking at the world through a lens rather than actually using one to make the picture.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  And the second point I would make is a lot of people, when they hear this theory, they, they think it's some great conspiracy.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  And that actually undermines the work.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  And that the artist is cheating. I don't think he's cheating. Even if he did use a device, fine. Every artist uses tools and you can have the greatest tool you like in the world, it's not going to lead you to make a masterpiece. You have to be a great artist to do that. And as you say, I think many of the greatest things about this picture are the things that he invented, the things that are purely pictorial and abstract. But it's a really interesting debate and I think that those qualities, that in and out of focus, those little sparkles of light which he uses in many pictures through the 1660s and beyond, they are part of what makes his work so astonishingly alluring.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  So just one thing that I wanted to mention in terms of a possible source for this picture, because she has this iconic feel, doesn't she, as a figure?

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  And some people, there's an art historian called Arthur Wheelock, who in particular, who was responsible for the big show of Vermeer in the mid 90s that was in Washington in the Moritz House. And he talks about the idea that there could be a precedent for this. And the precedent could be an image from Italian art. There was a painting of Queen Artemisia by someone called Domenico Fiasella, who I had to look up, a Baroque painter from Genoa, in which you see a similarly statuesque monumental person with a sort of jug, pouring something from a jug. I find it very interesting because first of all, I think if that's the case, and it's an image that he's aware of,

• 44:38Speaker 00

  he is transforming this lowly worker and turning her into some sort of queen, giving her this regal status. But also, we were talking about the potential influence on Vermeer of Italian pictures. And it's interesting that this threshold work, where maybe this is the sort of mature Vermeer we're moving into from the milkmaid onwards, he's still mentally thinking about Italian art.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  That's so interesting. I could talk about this picture forever, actually. Isn't it wonderful that, and so brave and so extraordinary, that the very centre of this picture, not actually physically, but the centre of it in terms of conceptually, is a black hole.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  There is a void right at the heart of this painting, so bold, we are staring right into the darkness.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  You know, we haven't spoken about the meaning, the significance of this painting. And there's a long tradition within Netherlandish, within Dutch art of depicting kitchen maids, milkmaids, which Vermeer is drawing upon.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  And I would suggest transforming. So it is essentially, it's an erotic tradition. If you look, there is, there are all sorts of examples of paintings in which milkmaids, kitchen maids are flirting with men. And the supposition is that the high-class or middle-class male viewer who's paying for the painting likes to be sort of flattered in this sense, that they're buying a picture of an attractive maiden. And quite often you will find some quite explicitly suggestive anatomical metaphors, if you like, in the paintings. So maybe a piece of meat is being skewered or a maid might be pointing a jug.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  A, as, what was the phrase that I came across? One brilliant art historian who worked at the Met for many years referred to a sort of uterine object.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Is this the guy who very sadly died in a train crash a few years ago?

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Is that what happened?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  That's terrible. I didn't know that.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, he thought, his big theory was that the milkmaid is all about sex.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Yes. It's quite controversial. And I think what's undeniable, I mean, the point is that you can find another picture by another Dutch artist where you will find a maid who is pointing a jug in exactly that way. A void, clear, in that case, clear analogy for the female anatomy. Underneath it, in that particular painting I'm thinking of, there are some very phallic carrots. There's another one where you can see a farmhand, he's sort of fingering, as it were, one of these.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Brandishing.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  He is, there is, he's doing something very suggestive with his finger with a jug. So, you know, that's what he's doing. I can't describe it any other way. If you look at the milkmaid, there is a sense, and I think it is a compelling argument, that this well-established tradition is clearly in the background of the painting. Not only that, it is then explicitly alluded to by, do you remember the mention of the tile with the little cupid?

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, with his bow.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  You know, cupid appears in that earlier painting of the girl, he's reading the letter in the form of a big painting on the wall, like this sort of rampant toddler that's kind of above the, above the girl. Here, he's just tiny and the foot warmer, which again, oh God, I'm sort of tying myself up in knots. But the idea of sort of warmth beneath the skirts, again, perhaps suggests, is, could be a metaphor for female sexual arousal. So that is an argument which is being made.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Do you buy that argument?

• 48:02Speaker 00

  I think undoubtedly Vermeer is conscious of that tradition and playing with the tradition. And I think he is adapting and transforming the tradition because if you look at the painting, it doesn't feel... Instinctively, does it? You look at it as though she's somehow flirting. There is a nice argument that perhaps, and this is one of his, could be his sort of genius, perhaps what he's suggesting is she's performing a very mundane chore, but there is a hint of her internal life, which I quite like. Perhaps she's actually has amorous thoughts. She's thinking about, you know, there's even been this interpretation of that tile I mentioned of the traveller. Maybe he subtly represents an absent lover that she has in mind.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  I quite like that as an interpretation. I'm sensing from your body language that you're very sceptical.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  I'm just a meaning sceptic, actually, in general. I think that for us as art historians, art critics, it is very appealing. It's irresistible, actually, especially when confronted with a picture as enigmatic as this, to try to solve it, to say, ah, it's all about this and I've found it out. And there have been lots of those theories banded around over this picture. There's the theory that it's all about sex. A recent art historian, a man called Andrew Graham Dixon, has published a book about Vermeer and thinks it's a very elaborate metaphor for religion. But could it not just be a picture of a kitchen maid?

• 49:26Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Why not?

• 49:28Speaker 00

  You are profoundly wrong. I've got one of those ludicrously speculative theories and I feel now is the moment to share.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Go on, advance it.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Because I think what is going on here is I was looking at this and I suddenly thought, you know what this reminds me of more than anything? Is what's known in Western art as an enunciation.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  So in an enunciation, it's the moment where the archangel Gabriel, I mean, this is, this would be shot down by any scholar, but just hear me out because I think there's something of it. In an enunciation, you have the archangel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she is going to bear the son of God. God often comes in the form of possibly a beam of light or a dove on a beam of light, coming from that left-hand part of the composition often to then light up Mary who's on the right.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Sometimes through a window.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  Sometimes through a window. And I sort of thought, I can't be the only one to have thought of this. Some people have suggested that, yes, there is a feeling because of the drama of the light here, of maybe that sort of sacred moment of recognition or realisation about an enunciation. You have a number of different elements which could go with this theory. She's wearing that apron, which is blue. And I mean, I don't need to tell you, the man who's the expert on colour, that using lapis lazuli ultramarine was what? I mean, come on, at least he would be by revealing what that significance is.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was the classic colour of the Virgin Mary to show her in ultramarine, the most expensive, the most prestigious colour. And of course, she was the queen of heaven and blue was the colour of the sky.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  I rest my case. And then you have a sense, which you will often find, I think, in an enunciation scene, which is a sense of purity and humility. Unbroken vessels are often a symbol for Mary in an enunciation. That's what you're finding here. I even then went completely down the rabbit hole and was imagining that, you know, there's a lot of bread. Christ is associated with bread, calls himself the bread of life. You could perhaps, this is an ironic reference, that cupid could be interpreted with his wings as a little sort of subtle touch of, okay, there isn't literally an archangel Gabriel, but maybe somehow there's a little memory of that tradition. Maybe the traveller's John the Baptist, you know, wandering pilgrim.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  And then I was thinking, okay, look, this is never, if that were sort of, you know, you made that argument, every art historian at the Rijksmuseum and elsewhere would say, okay, it's total supposition. But what I did wonder is whether what we're looking at here, and the reason maybe there is a sort of background archetype of an enunciation going on, that it's somehow playing off. It feels to me that this is an image about possibly the moment of creation, of life, and possible pregnancy. And we described at the beginning of this how he and his wife Katerina had many, many, many children. And at this moment in the 1650s, it's when that all starts.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  And perhaps Vermeer himself is quite wonderstruck by this idea. And there is a sense somehow of, I can't help now but see that jug as a sort of uterine symbol. There is a sense of milk, which is a nourishing thing for a mother to be giving to her child, her baby. It is being held very close to her womb. It is being illuminated in this quasi-divine fashion.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Do you believe this?

• 52:51Speaker 00

  I mean, I persuaded myself.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Look, I've got a couple of questions for you. If it's an enunciation, why not paint an enunciation?

• 52:58Speaker 00

  Yes, and here we come to the coded religious historical imperatives of the time, which I accept I would have to do further research into.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  Can I give you my speculation about this picture, which isn't really about the meaning, but it's about related, it's about the subject matter. So I think this is a painting set in Vermeer's home, in his mother-in-law's home, Maria Thins's home. Because I've always been fascinated with the house in which Vermeer has lived. You know, when people ask you, when they say, if you could go back in history to anywhere, where would you go? I have never been in any doubt that if I were given that opportunity, I would go back to Delft in the 1660s. Because I would just kill for the opportunity to go inside that building and to walk through the rooms that have inspired some of the most beautiful paintings in the history of art, and then to walk upstairs to Vermeer's studio and to tap this man, we only know him from his back,

• 53:52Speaker 01

  from that famous painting, on the shoulder and to meet Vermeer himself. And one of the fascinating things is that though Vermeer is very mysterious, we know very little about him. You've alluded to this already, Alastair. We know a great deal about the house in which he lived. Because after he died, the bailiffs came in.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  And they did an inventory of the house. And this inventory contains a list of all the objects in the house. And if you go through that inventory, as I have done very carefully, and you cross-reference it with the paintings, you can find many of those objects in the actual paintings. So in that inventory, there is a so-called interior kitchen. And in that kitchen, there is an octagonal pull-out table, just like there is in the painting. It's covered with a green tablecloth, just as it is in the painting. There are two foot warmers, just as there is one in the painting. And there are pots and pans and baskets, just as there are in the painting. So I think this is a painting of Vermeer's own kitchen.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  And I even have a theory as to who the person is. I even know her name.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Go on.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  So there was a housemaid in Maria Thins's house, in Vermeer's mother-in-law's house, called Tanaka Everpole. Remarkable woman, she was a kitchen maid there. She was much loved by the family. We know this because when Maria Thins died, she left money to Tanaka in her will. And we know that Tanaka was also extremely brave woman. Because, I mentioned in the first half of this episode, that Maria Thins had an abusive husband. She also had an abusive son. And this son would often come to the house, create a commotion in the street. He tried to kill his mother at one point. He tried to attack his sister, Vermeer's own wife, when she was pregnant. Maybe that's relevant. And we know this from a police record that at one point when he was trying to attack Vermeer's wife,

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Tanaka intervened bravely to protect Vermeer's wife. So I think this might be Tanaka Everpole in Vermeer's kitchen. Now, there are a couple of problems with the theory, as there are with yours.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  There are none with mine, yeah.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  One is that we don't know that she was already employed in the house in the 1650s. We know she's working there in the 1660s.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  So she may not have arrived, but she may have arrived. And the other thing, of course, is that Vermeer wasn't in the business of painting portraits. You know, this is not supposed to be read as a painting of a specific person. But it makes sense. If you're painting pictures very slowly and Vermeer took months to paint a picture, it's likely that you would do it in your home with an easily accessible person who wouldn't be expensive as a model.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  So, I mean, that doesn't answer the question of the meaning.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  No, well, I mean, what's fascinating to me is I think we have here two poles of interpretation. Mine is a castle in the air, bullshit, a castle in the air. But, you know, something which is quite speculative. Yours is absolutely mired, I would say, in historical fact. And both are to the detriment, perhaps, of the picture. But what I would say is that the enunciation idea, okay, fine, we can probably rule it out. But something is going on in this painting that I think your, what was that character in Dickens? Mr Gradgrind, your sort of, your approach doesn't quite deliver on, which is that when you look at this,

• 57:19Speaker 00

  as I said at the start, it's a painting of something really ordinary, but the way Vermeer paints it is totally extraordinary. There is no question that you can sense when looking at this that there is some other quasi-spiritual, some sort of transcendent meaning, which is somehow implied and suggested by it. So whilst maybe that is the octagonal table that was in the interior kitchen, although I'm not sure I can quite count eight sides, nevertheless, I'm not sure necessarily that does, as you've said, reveal the kind of underlying greatness of the picture, as fascinating as it is.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  I think the greatness of the picture is in its visual appeal. I mean, in its incredible compositional complexity, remarkable technique that's gone into it. I don't need the meaning, really. I mean, I think the meaning could be as simple as the nobility of work. Here's a kitchen maid. We don't take them seriously, but look, she's extraordinary and she's really committed to what she's doing.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  But do you discount the sex reading totally?

• 58:20Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  Because, I mean, what?

• 58:23Speaker 01

  It doesn't seem like a very sexy picture. I mean, you know, it's easy to go and look at all the different little details inside it, the foot warmer, the cupid in the background. I mean, there could well have been a cupid tile right there anyway.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  It's not impossible.

• 58:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  The foot warmer, we know, was in that room anyway.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  But this is the only time he paints a foot warmer in his career. If it was there, he'd be painting every other picture.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  But it's not even his first choice, is it?

• 58:45Speaker 00

  But what you're suggesting is that he's an automaton. He can only paint if it's in that room where he's painting.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  He starts by painting a basket. He removes the basket halfway through the picture and puts a foot warmer there, which was probably in the room anyway.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  Because it has significance.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Well, if it had significance, why wouldn't you have it in the first place?

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Originally, it was actually something which was a portable heat source. So the foot warmer, it becomes, maybe as he's painting, it evolves, his ideas becomes sharper and he thinks, you know, it will be even more effective as a metaphor for interiority for a woman and her sexual arousal. It's a foot warmer.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  I think what he does is he's a stage designer, Vermeer, isn't he? He's working in these rooms, probably in the house that he's living in. And he's moving things around to create these little stage sets. He's like a film director.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  And that is what he's doing. And I think that, okay, sometimes they, all of those objects that he's placing in position might have this incredibly powerful meaning that we don't fully understand. But sometimes it might just be, that looks good there, that looks good there. The laundry basket was too big. Is there something smaller I can have on the floor? Ah, the foot warmer, it's right there.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  James, your entire discipline of art history is predicated on taking the exact opposite approach.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  I think it's important to be sceptical sometimes. And I also think, as I say, I totally understand why we want to interpret it this way, why you might want to interpret it this way, because it's a picture that is so profound.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  That you feel it must have that. And maybe it's just a great picture.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  Well, it certainly is a great picture. And I don't agree with the idea that essentially it's a sort of dirty minded reading of it, which I think is kind of what you're hinting at. But I think he is aware of that tradition because he is a very sophisticated, very gifted, good artist. And he's playing with it and adapting it. Perhaps, perhaps his, perhaps his gift, the sort of genius, is to say, rather than creating a comely flirtatious maid, I know that's what you expect. That's the expectation of a genre picture like this. I'm going to give you something else, a real woman with real interior thoughts, a lowly worker, who I'm depicting as a sacred heroine and who has this great sense of, as I said, monumentality and dignity.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  And she does have both of those things.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  But do you not think that those things are even greater? If you have that earlier tradition, which he's bouncing off and playing with, and that's the sophistication of the picture. I mean, I love that idea.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Hmm, I think so. I think that there is a contradiction at the heart of it in that if he's playing with the idea that kitchen maids are associated with sexual availability, and there are references to sexual titillation and to lust and to love in this picture. That does clash for me and jar with the depiction of the woman herself, who has this incredible concentration, as you say, dignity and nobility. Doesn't quite add up to me. And the kitchen maid works that you talk about in the past, the tradition he's working with, show them they're often looking out at the viewer. They're often doing something, as you say, explicitly titillating.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  It just doesn't, it doesn't seem quite right for me here.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  Isn't that what the essence of Vermeer is though? He's taking these slightly more, what's the phrase? It's sort of like market savvy, slightly lewd traditions in certain cases. And he's creating something that's far more mysterious and enigmatic. And that's why those pictures that he creates somehow have that timeless quality and more universal aspect than the other pictures that we've just been describing.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  I think that's so, that's totally true. And it's, and it's one of the reasons why he is still absolutely loved. And many of those other works feel very much of their time rather than of all time. But I think we should begin to reach the

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  Now we're friends again.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  We should begin to reach the end of the episode. I think it's important to say that Vermeer had finished this work by the late 1650s. If anything, in the following decade, he gets even better. He paints the view of Delft, he paints the woman holding a balance, probably my single favourite. Vermeer, he paints the girl with a pearl earring.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  That's in front of a last judgement with the balance. You're going to tell me that there's no significance whatsoever to the fact that

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  I think that definitely is. I think that definitely is. And maybe we could do that as a separate episode at some point. He paints the art of painting, which has that incredible, probably self portrait seen from behind in the 1660s. And yet Vermeer, the tragedy really of Vermeer is that he never really makes it as an artist. He's relatively successful within Delft, but he never makes a lot of money because he's terrible at business. He's so slow.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  And he has such a big family.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  He's got an enormous family. He's only painting two pictures a year. It's impossible to make a lot of money if you're only painting two pictures a year. And then what happens in 1672, so this is 14 years, 13 or 14 years after he paints the milkmaid. The French and other European powers invade the Dutch Republic. This is called the disaster year. And the whole of the Dutch Republic is ruined. The harvest fails, the economy craters, it's the end of the Dutch golden age, which Vermeer had lived through up to this point. And Vermeer, I think you mentioned this earlier, Vermeer ends up joining the militia.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  The Delft militia. We know from that famous inventory, he has armour and a pike in the great hall. So he may have done some fighting, who knows? But what we do know is that economically, financially, he is screwed by this situation.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  As in the market sort of disappears, right?

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  The market disappears. He's in debt. I mean, there is this great figure that he owes his baker 617 guilders, which is the equivalent of four tonnes of bread. And he ends up in the last year of his life, travelling around the country, desperately trying to raise money, desperately trying to borrow money so he can feed his enormous family. And at this point of his life, we get a really fascinating passage. We know absolutely nothing about Vermeer's character, but this is a passage written by his wife that reveals so much. She says, during the ruinous war with France, he not only was unable to sell any of his art, but also to his great detriment, was left sitting with the paintings of other masters that he was dealing in. So he was also an art dealer, like his father.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  As a result, owing to the great burden of his children having no means of his own, he lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart, that as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half, he went from being healthy to being dead. And in the middle of December 1675, Vermeer dies, probably of a stroke or a heart attack. He's only 43 years old when he dies, younger than us. And a year after that, his widow files for bankruptcy. Tough end, isn't it?

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  It's really sad. And there is this idea that I alluded to before, that he sort of almost disappears from art history for quite a spell. That isn't quite true. I mean, there are already in his lifetime, connoisseurs, foreigners who are travelling and arrive in Delft and seek out and see Vermeer. You have people in the 18th century, for example, there's an English artist, Joshua Reynolds.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  Who really admires, he sees a collection of, I think it's an Amsterdam banker, and he owns Vermeer's and has the milkmaid. And he sees the milkmaid and thinks it's a striking picture. You know, the view of Delft that you mentioned, that's actually acquired by the Moritz House much earlier in the 19th century than the so-called rediscovery. admittedly that's within the Netherlands in 1822, I think. But you really have this moment where his fame just becomes exponential and grows during the 20th and into the 21st centuries, doesn't it?

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  And you can't help but feel there's something about the sensibility of the art that meshes perhaps with artist in a way that if you think of sort of 18th century art, it feels very different to the kind of thing that Vermeer is painting.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  What I love about Vermeer's work is that he has this ability to make the most humble things, whether it's someone reading a letter or pouring some milk or a crumbling kitchen wall. He's able to make those humble things seem heroic and beautiful. And I can't think of many artists who have so compellingly shown the ordinary to be extraordinary.

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  I mean, the curious thing is, of course, that doesn't actually have the impact you think it might, because the work is not that well known. He doesn't actually produce that much work in an era before photographic reproduction. Where was it available to be seen? It takes a long time until it is known. It's quite interesting that it's that moment where

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  it's the moment of impressionism, actually.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  Where suddenly he is, as it were, rediscovered by the French. And do you, can you see any links there at all?

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  17th century pointillism.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely, it's the brushwork. And that's one of the great things about seeing of Vermeer in the flesh, is that when you look at it close up, you realise actually how radical and abstract his brushwork is. And you first really see that in the milkmaid. It's the first painting when he's doing something really, really different with his technique. And that is what gives those pictures such sparkle.

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  And I think more than justifies spending this long focusing, talking about one particular picture. I feel sad I haven't persuaded you with my enunciation theory. I think we need to do a future episode where I'm, I'm going to master all those arguments. I'm going to get some support, I hope, from some other art historians. People who believe in art history, James, rather than Occam's razor approach, but

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Don't get me wrong, Alistair, I'm an enormous fan of Vermeer. I think at his best, his paintings are some of the most beautiful objects that any human being has ever made. They're like little jewel boxes. I think of Vermeer as a kind of watchmaker, a person who's, every tiny little component is so perfectly honed. They are remarkable, remarkable, such intellectually, visually, technically accomplished pieces of work. And I find it deeply inspiring that in a world in which we're, everything's done quickly and efficiently, that someone could spend months and months and months working on a picture not much larger than a postcard. So thank heavens for perfectionists.

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  Three cheers for Vermeer.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Well, Alistair, it has been such a pleasure.

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  It has been good.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  To spend the last hour or so talking with you about this work that obviously means so much to both of us. Goodbye.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  Goodbye.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Join us next week in mid 20th century Paris as we explore the strange, emaciated sculptures of Alberto Giacometti. And if you've enjoyed this episode, please do follow Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts.