The Milkmaid (De Melkmeid or Het Melkmeisje or Maidservant), sometimes called The Kitchen Maid, is an oil-on-canvas painting of a "milkmaid", in fact a domestic kitchen maid, 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".[1]

The exact year of the painting's completion is unknown, with estimates varying by source. The Rijksmuseum estimates it as circa 1658. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it was painted in about 1657 or 1658.[2] The "Essential Vermeer" website gives a broader range of 1658–1661

During the late 1650s, Vermeer, along with his colleague Pieter de Hooch, began to place a new emphasis on depicting figures within carefully composed interior spaces. Other Dutch painters, including Gerard Ter Borch and Gabriel Metsu, painted similar scenes, but they were less concerned with the articulation of the space than with the description of the figures and their actions. In early paintings such as The Milkmaid (c.1658; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Vermeer struck a delicate balance between the compositional and figural elements, and he achieved highly sensuous surface effects by applying paint thickly and modeling his forms with firm strokes. Later he turned to thinner combinations of glazes to obtain the subtler and more transparent surfaces displayed in paintings such as Woman with a Water Jug (c.1664/5; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City).

The Maidservant (The Milkmaid) has on the surface some resemblance to the painting of Vermeer's predecessors, but both the plan of the picture and the refined style of representation belong to his maturity. The detail of life is rendered here as a bare map of the incidence of light. The optical vocabulary becomes at once so convincing and complete that it is not always recognized how deep is the change, how unexplained in this head for instance the accent of the cheek, how unexpected the omission of drawing at the base of the nose and across the expanse of shadow. There is a wide gulf between this confident manner and the head of the Laughing Girl. The maid's left arm, as comparison with the passage in the Edinburgh picture demonstrates, draws from its contour neither form nor supporting detail; the record of tone is bare of the structural modeling of the Dresden Letter Reader. The other arm, equally independent of convention, of necessity relies more on its defining outline, and round it are visible, strangely, the pentimenti which rarely occur in the painter's work.

The Maidservant has been a favourite picture of those who have seen Vermeer as a simple precursor of Chardin and of Corot. It is perhaps largely in the interests of a uniform progression, in whichever direction, that it has commonly been counted among his early works. Few have followed Dr. Valentiner to the extreme, in dating the picture two years before The Procuress. There is in fact little reason in the view of Vermeer's development as a steady and elegant decline. For all the weight and continuity of modeling in the Maidservant its beauty lies as much in the elements which contradict them. It is perhaps only the radical change of method, approaching an abdication of the traditional demands upon painters to know and understand, that allows the painter "here to make his single frontal assault on the problem of physical immediacy which lies at the heart of his development. We may imagine a mood of confidence, a liberation; the boldness does not quite agree with his temperament and it is possible to prefer the tender yet inflexible system of tone against which he balances the magnetism of the Lacemaker. In the Maidservant he treats a common subject of genre painting in previous decades, following precisely the pattern of Gerard Dou (upper right). The lustrous simplicity with which he handles the material of commonplace things pays another distant tribute to Carel Fabritius. But the vision that emerges is his own.

The Milkmaid, a special exhibition that brings together all five paintings by Vermeer from its collection, along with a select group of works by other Dutch artists, placing Vermeer’s superb picture in its historical context. Along with The Milkmaid, important works by Pieter de Hooch, Gabriël Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, Emanuel de Witte, and Gerard ter Borch are on view. All were masters who, like Vermeer, were active during the remarkable period of exploration, trade, and artistic flowering that occurred during the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century. Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid marks the first time that the painting has traveled to the United States since it was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair.
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To digress a moment...even though Vermeer is one of the great artists of history, he nonetheless sometimes exhibits flaws in his handling of anatomy.  In his "The Astronomer," the arms of the searcher of the heavens appear to be too short for his body.  Yes, they are bent and foreshortened, but the foreshortening seems not convincingly achieved.  In "The Milkmaid," her right arm appears too small for her body and in comparison with her left arm.  If viewers do not force themselves to ignore it, it can become a deformity that, as in real life, one strives out of politeness not to stare at in a fellow human being, but which, like a magnet, can draw our attention.