'Het melkmeisje' ('The Milkmaid')

[Click image for larger version.]

Johannes Vermeer
Het melkmeisje ('The Milkmaid'), c. 1658
Oil on canvas, w41 cm x h45.5 cm (16.14" x 17.91")
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

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Continuing the genre hierarchy exploration, we fully bring back people as subjects with the confusingly named "genre" genre of painting. For a quick reminder of the complete traditional hierarchy, this is the list again (most 'important' at top), with the ones we've already done crossed out:

  1. History/mythology/religious painting
  2. Portrait
  3. Genre
  4. Landscape
  5. Animal painting
  6. Still life

For this...category, we'll tie the word "genre" to the word "generic", as in 'generic scenes of everyday life'. Genre painting1 involves depictions (usually non-idealized) of 1) ordinary day-to-day activities, in 2) common settings, 3) done by ordinary people.

More to the point, they're everyday scenes involving non-specific people. In other words, in all the 'important' paintings, the audience is meant to recognize the main player(s), and the subject is meant to be something significant that that person is doing. Maybe a king leading an army into battle, a queen blessing an expedition, a saint saving souls and/or being martyred, a god doing god business. In these 'important' works, the only way someone like a servant would be the main focus is if that servant was secretly Cleopatra, Artemis, or King Arthur in disguise.

In genre paintings, the specific identity of the person/people portrayed is genuinely not important. You're not meant to look at a genre work (take the image above as example) and say, "Oh, that's Sarah the Specific (Kitchen)maid2, and that's that time she poured the milk!' Rather, the individuals traditionally represented types — the laborer/peasant, the maid, the tradesman, the servant, the young scholar, the old beggar, etc3. An individual face is used just so the 'type' can be shown realistically, but any number of other individuals could just as easily have been used as the model4.

And for the sample work today, I'm forcing more Dutch people upon you. Within the Dutch Golden Age of painting (which we've already looked at a bit in still life5), there was a kind of sub-blossoming of genre painting as a dignified category in its own right. And looking at the above Vermeer, you can really see why; this is just beautiful, precise, light-driven work, with an apparently empathetic and respectful portrayal of an ordinary young woman going about her daily work.

Just a few complicating points for full context though:
  1. It does have to be mentioned that, funnily enough, Vermeer achieved only moderate success and reputation during his own life, and wasn't counted as 'important' for about two hundred years. As always, as much art history is decided after the fact as is recognized in the moment.

  2. You probably don't look at this painting and think 'dripping with sex connotations,' but that is because you are not a well-off 17th century Dutch man. But in fairness to Vermeer's fairness to this young woman, the allusions to romance and eroticism are discreet to the point of half-suggestions, and the virtue of her careful, useful work (along with her near-tangibly-solid character) is being emphasized more.

  3. What this painting was intended to be 'about', if it were ever really thought about in such terms, remains a mystery. But this ambiguity exists to a greater or lesser degree in most genre painting, and is actually a lot of the appeal of working with this genre in the first place.

 NOTES:
  1. Adding to the confusion, 'genre painting' today may also mean works relating to sci-fi/fantasy. Because nothing is allowed to be simple ever.

  2. Technically, 'milkmaids' are those women who actually milk the cows. What is depicted above would be a 'kitchenmaid' or 'housemaid', a maid-of-all-work who operates inside a household.

  3. The more local the audience for the work, the more specific the types can get. Basically think of the stereotypical 'types' of people that exist where you live currently, and you'll get the idea. 

  4. In other words, the rule of thumb is that if you can swap the individual(s) portrayed for other individuals, without losing any of the painting's meaning, then yup it's genre. If the individual's identity is important, that's a portrait. If the individual's identity is important and what they're doing is important, that's probably history painting. And as always, all of these categories are flexible, fuzzy, and overlapped.

  5. So why did the Dutch become famous for still life, landscape, genre paintings, portraits...basically the 'lower' genres in the hierarchy, but not history/religious painting? Seems due to two main reasons: One, the Dutch religious system (Dutch Calvinism) forbade religious representation in churches on the grounds that it was a  form of idol worship (leading to worship of the image rather than what the image represented). Churches were historically the biggest purchasers of the sorts of large-skill religious works you'd find in e.g. the Italian Renaissance, and religious works were at this time the most common of the 'historical' genre, so with no one to buy artists had to shift their focus. And that brings us to second reason, so Two, works in the 'lower' genres sold better. Many artists still wanted to do the sorts of large-scale history/narrative paintings that had brought fame and respect throughout art history, but portrait commissions were better bets and genre paintings/still life/landscape-and-maritime-paintings sold better still (possibly because the purchaser could eventually resell these if need be). So sucks to be them, but it ended up producing tons of innovation down the ladder that seems to have worked out for the best.