The Milkmaid Vermeer

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The Milkmaid by Vermeer. Humairah Afzaal. Year 8. "There is a tactile, visceral quality to The Milkmaid — you can almost taste the thick, creamy milk escaping the jug, feel the cool dampness of the room and the starchy linen of the maid's white cap, touch her sculptural shoulders and corseted waist. She is not an apparition or abstraction. She is not the ideal, worldly housewife of Vermeer's later Young Woman with a Water Pitcher or the ethereal beauty in Girl with a Pearl Earring. She is not the cartoonish buxom vixen in Leyden's drawing. She is real — as real as a painting can get anyway."[2] The Milkmaid, sometimes called The Kitchen Maid, is an oil-on-canvas painting of a "milkmaid", by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. It is housed in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, which esteems it as "unquestionably one of the museum's finest attractions". The exact year of the painting's completion is unknown. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it was painted in about 1657 or 1658. On 29 December 1653, Vermeer became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke, a trade association for painters. The guild's records make clear Vermeer did not pay the usual admission fee. It was a year of plague, war and economic crisis; not only Vermeer's financial circumstances were difficult. In 1654, the city of Delft suffered the terrible explosion known as the Delft Thunderclap that destroyed a large section of the city. [1] In 1657 (the year he made the painting: The milkmaid) he might have found a patron in the local art collector Pieter van Ruijven, who lent him some money. The painting has been renowned by many people throughout history. At the time when this painting was a house decoration, it represented the history of Delft, but now, that the painting belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; it represents historical events of

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