In this catalogue for the exhibition, Walter Liedtke, Curator of Paintings at the Metropolitan, drawing on the Museum's five Vermeers, scenes by other Dutch masters in the Museum's collection, including Pieter de Hooch, Gabriel Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, and Emanuel de Witte, and several works on paper, places the picture in the context of the artist's brief career and relates it to contemporary developments in Dutch art. In addition to an extended discussion of the painting's provenance, he provides a detailed study of the composition, the several revisions made during the course of execution, and the subtle relationships between light and shadow, color, contour, and shape. And he proposes a most intriguing argument for an erotic subtext, pointing out that, like maids and kitchen maids in earlier Netherlandish art, the figure in The Milkmaid was meant to attract the male viewer, to rouse in him temptation and restraint, desire and reservation, while the kitchen maid herself, endowed with traits typically reserved for higher-class women and surrounded by references to romance both literal and oblique, is presented as having amorous thoughts of her own.
This publication is the Museum's descriptive catalogue of its 2,500 paintings, oil sketches, and finished pastels, each one illustrated and presented chronologically by national and regional school. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.
The painter Jacob Duck (c.1600-1667) was active mainly in Utrecht, and his rise to success and recognition paralleled the phenomenon known as the Dutch Golden Age. His style of painting is a unique blend of the humor and eroticism found in the works of the Utrecht Caravaggisti with that of the Haarlem painters of Merry Company scenes. He painted mainly genre themes and was a central contributor to the rise and assimilation of both the Guardroom and the Brothel Scene. His paintings are striking due to their high level of theatricality, humor and sexual innuendo, traits he bestowed upon the following generation of Dutch genre painting. This book is the first ever monograph study of Jacob Duck and includes a complete critical catalogue of all his known works of art.
Two volumes, including works by the three foremost seventeenth-century Flemish artists{u2014}Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens{u2014}as well as works by their contemporaries. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.