the girl with the furrowed brow

Upon careful consideration, I have reached an opinion about Vermeer’s The Milkmaid.

In general, this topic would not concern me at all, not because I have a problem with Vermeer, milkmaids, or Dutch Baroque art, but because I have little interest in them. But when I want a small, focused, educational visit to the Met, I always choose the special exhibits, and I had already seen the other ones.

The exhibition consisted of a small collection, and I chose to study the iconic painting last. It is curated focusing on two essential aspects of the piece: that the painting is a Vermeer, and that the woman is a milkmaid, and I started there.

Vermeer painted women. He painted women who were desirable. He painted women who were desirable in 17th century Hague. Standing in a small room with Vermeer's women encircling me, I was struck by their very appropriateness. This may seem odd, because he did not depict picture-perfect women with fancy hair and impeccable posture. He painted them doing things, looking eager, being tired, pouring milk, playing a lute, being women. He painted them being women. Vermeer knew his client base: wealthy men. These wealthy men wanted pictures of nice women doing nice, womanly things. There are few men present in his work, but the presence of men is overwhelming: A Maid Asleep (1656-7) is tired after entertaining a potential lover. The Woman With a Lute (1662-3) is preparing for a music-themed date. The Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (1662) is an ideal woman in an ideal home. Each painting glows with femininity, modesty, purity, grace, womanhood; gender stereotypes abound. The females he painted were perfect pictures of Woman, though he placed her in scenes unprecedented at that time. Everyone loves the girl with the pear earring. (And I must note: even this part of the exhibition was walled off, secluding these timeless women in a small, quaint, controlled environment.

Across the room, tucked in a little nook but spilling a bit into the larger area, were the milkmaids. Besides neck ruffs, dead fowl, and experiemental lighting, Dutch painters loved the milkmaid. Perhaps because bougeoise society was so chaste, this subject was a perfect sexual metaphor. The small collection of paintings huddled in the corner were rough, lewd, and boisterous. They depicted working women in kitchens and at the marketplace, most with silly faces and bulging busoms pointed toward the dirty delivery boy. They looked cheap and pop and a little bit easy, their appeal resting on a flirtation with and allusion to sex that was about as subtle as the Twilight series. And the captions pointed out symbolism I wouldn't even have conscidered: in just a few paintings, metaphors for sex include the act of milking ("a sinewey thing she has siezed with joy"--Lucas van Leyden's The Milkmaid, 1510), a mortar and pestle ("placed next to an errect candle"--Louis de Surugue's A Young Woman Chopping Onions, 1724), archery ("shooting your bolt"--Andries Stock's The Archer and the Milkmaid, 1610), and dangling birds and a chicken on a spit (for male and female reproductive parts, respectively--Peter Wtewael's Kitchen Scene, 1620s). It's clear: milkmaid is code for tart.

So the fusion of these two ideas is The Milkmaid. Shes is not one of Vermeer's waiting women. Her ruddy arms and thick middle, her contemplative downward glance, her dirty room--she was a woman at work. But she is not working on attracting every stable boy in town or experimenting with her sexuality or being a tease. Her surroundings are not heavy-handed metaphors or innuendos. The thoughts that lay beneath that furrowed brow could be of plans for the future or some new philosophy or her recipe for the pudding--or even a man. But we don't know. Her world is not revolving around a letter or visit from a lover. She does not care to tell us. The Milkmaid has desexualized herself by drawing inward, pulling her hair back, getting dirty--something uncommon in the context of her time period. She hits the in-between of Vermeer's bachelorettes and the milkmaid stereotypes wantonness. She can be seen as more a Person, less a Woman.

I, less a feminist than a humanist, rather like this.