Adam van Breen, Aelbert Cuyp, François van Daellen, Gerrit Dou, and Johannes Vermeer are all Dutch painters from the seventeenth century. Johannes Vermeer painted The Milkmaid, which can be interpreted in many ways depending on how a viewer looks at color, lighting, and positions. A lot of the time, a painter will paint from his culture and his heart. Over time cultures will change and evolve. The Dutch are no exception to this, so their seventeenth century culture was vastly different from their current culture. One example, the Dutch were under the influence of Catholic Spain, but they fought in the Eighty Year War (1568 - 1648) in order to break free of the Catholic influence. Vermeer painted The Milkmaid for roughly a year, from 1657 – 1658; it was created …show more content…
Vermeer used lighting, color differences, and item placement in the painting to showcase his differences compared to other painters, as well as to convey things present in Dutch culture at the time he was painting The Milkmaid, such as social status and the sexual availability of servants.
Vermeer used many techniques that helped him produce his artwork, and the way he based items in his paintings or how he would color things was in response to his culture at the time. Lighting allows onlookers to see this in the painting more clearly, and it is one of the main ways he was able to show the details in his artwork. The first aspect of The Milkmaid to look at is the lighting; in the painting, spectators can see that Vermeer used a lot of light colors. According to Laura Snyder, the author of a book that focuses on “optical investigations of seventeenth century Dutch innovators Johannes Vermeer and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek,” Vermeer achieved the luminous look of