“Vermeer’s Masterpiece: The Milkmaid”

If there’s one thing you can say about the work of Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), it’s that it never wears thin on repeated viewing, which is why this recession special of a survey—a roundup, basically, of collection holdings augmented by a single, high-profile loan—is likely to do land-office business. Trust us, this will be one packed exhibition, so expect to fight for a brief glimpse of the star of the show: Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (1657–58). Is it worth it? Absolutely; this is the first time the painting, which ordinarily resides in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, has graced our shores since the 1939 World’s Fair. Still, it’s a little depressing to consider how the economy has even cramped the style of the Met, constraining its ability to mount large shows with borrowed art.

As limited as it is, though, “Vermeer’s Masterpiece” does have its pleasures as long as you ignore the rationale given for the show: It’s said to mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York Harbor. What does one have to do with the other? Nothing, except for the fact that the Dutch hired Hudson to search for the fabled Northwest Passage to the Orient (only to find the future home of Chelsea Piers, instead), and that a century ago, the Met had mounted a similar paean to Netherlandish paintings to herald the 300th anniversary of the English sea captain’s excellent adventure. Back in 1909, it was easier to make the connection between art from Holland and the city’s Nieuw Amsterdam heritage; certainly, the notion stuck with the skippers of Gotham’s Gilded Age, who bought Dutch paintings in bulk—it’s the reason why, between the Frick and the Met, so many Vermeers grace New York, for which we should be eternally grateful.

Actually, one could make the case that the master of Delft’s output was of a piece with the Age of Exploration, and not just because maps of the world sometimes appear in his canvases. There is the matter of his possible acquaintance with neighbor Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, who may or may not have introduced Vermeer to lens grinding—leading, in turn, to the as-yet-unproven possibility that Vermeer used a camera obscura to aid in limning his greatest works. On that hotly debated issue, the show’s organizers are mum, other than to briefly mention in one wall text that The Milkmaid appears “photographic” to modern eyes. Yes it does. But by surrounding the piece with other Vermeers from its holdings, as well as paintings by some of the Dutch master’s contemporaries, the Met has elected—quite sensibly from a box-office standpoint—to focus on another topic, with wider appeal: sex.

For two centuries prior to Vermeer’s debut, milkmaids—and female kitchen help in general—were popular in Dutch art, mainly due to widely held assumption that they were sluts. How, exactly, this became part of the job description is hard to say, though obviously it was a male fantasy, one that Dutch artists—even Vermeer—were not above indulging. As a particularly overt example, the show offers Kitchen Scene by Peter Wtewael (1596–1660), dating from the 1620s, which depicts a suitably lusty-looking if dimly-lit wench impaling a small chicken on a roasting spit while exchanging knowing glances with a young lad. The anatomical associations between skewer and bird are unmistakable enough to warrant the inclusion of this painting, perhaps, in author Naomi Wolf’s upcoming book, tentatively titled A Cultural History of the Vagina.

The Milkmaid, on the other hand, is light-years removed in subtlety from Wtewael’s cartoonish composition, not only in terms of its luminosity, but also in the way it seems to focus on the interior life of its subject. She’s alone, pouring milk into a bowl, but her mind seems to be on something else, though just what is only hinted at by an easily missed detail—a border of blue tiles along the floor featuring the image of Cupid.

This painting represents the turning point of Vermeer’s oeuvre. The last of his early works, it introduces some of the otherworldly optical effects—the shimmering points of light, for example, dotting a loaf of bread—that would become the hallmark of his mature style. The painting also signals the beginning of Vermeer’s deeply empathetic delving into female psychology, making it not only unusual for his time, but for ours as well.

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