Vermeer's painting is one of the rare examples of a maid treated in an empathetic and dignified way, although amorous symbols in this work still exemplify the tradition. In Dutch literature and paintings of Vermeer's time, maids were often depicted as subjects of male desire-dangerous women threatening the honor and security of the home, the center of Dutch life-although some Vermeer contemporaries, such as Pieter de Hooch, had started to represent them in a more neutral way, as did Michael Sweerts. However by this time there was an alternative convention of painting women at work in the home as exemplars of Dutch domestic virtue, dealt with at length by Simon Schama. Closer to Vermeer's day, Nicolaes Maes painted several comic pictures now given titles such as The Lazy Servant. 1535–1575) and Frans Snyders (1579–1657), who had many followers and imitators, as well as Pieter Aertsen (who, like Beukelaer, had clients in Delft), the Utrecht Mannerist painter Joachim Wtewael (1566–1638), and his son, Peter Wtewael (1596–1660). The leading artists in this tradition were the Antwerp painters Joachim Beuckelaer (c. Some of the paintings were slyly suggestive, like The Milkmaid, others more coarsely so. For at least two centuries before the painting was created, milkmaids and kitchen maids had a reputation as being predisposed to love or sex, and this was frequently reflected in Dutch paintings of kitchen and market scenes from Antwerp, Utrecht and Delft.
The woman would have been known as a "kitchen maid" or maid-of-all-work rather than a specialised " milkmaid" at the time the painting was created: "milk maids" were women who milked cows kitchen maids worked in kitchens. Also shown is a detail from the maid's brilliant blue apron. Painting detail showing the foot warmer, with tiles of Cupid and a man with a pole on either side of it the clothes basket Vermeer removed from the painting was here. And our reaction is 'What is she thinking?'" Dutch iconography of maids She is going about her daily task, faintly smiling.
"There's a bit of mystery about her for modern audiences. "It's a little bit of a Mona Lisa effect" in modern viewers' reactions to the painting, according to Walter Liedtke, curator of the department of European paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and organizer of two Vermeer exhibits. Yet with half of the woman's face in shadow, it is "impossible to tell whether her downcast eyes and pursed lips express wistfulness or concentration," she wrote. "The light, though bright, doesn't wash out the rough texture of the bread crusts or flatten the volumes of the maid's thick waist and rounded shoulders", wrote Karen Rosenberg, an art critic for The New York Times. The painting is strikingly illusionistic, conveying not just details but a sense of the weight of the woman and the table. Intense light streams from the window on the left side of the canvas.
A foot warmer is on the floor behind her, near Delft wall tiles depicting Cupid (to the viewer's left) and a figure with a pole (to the right).
She is a young, sturdily built woman wearing a crisp linen cap, a blue apron and work sleeves pushed up from thick forearms. Also on the table in front of the milkmaid are various types of bread. Milkmaids began working solely in the stables before large houses hired them to do housework as well rather than hiring out for more staff. The painting shows a milkmaid, a woman who milks cows and makes dairy products like butter and cheese, in a plain room carefully pouring milk into a squat earthenware container on a table.
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