Vermeer's Milkmaid at the Met

In commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's arrival in what is now New York, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has loaned Johannes Vermeer's Milkmaid to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Though the accompanying exhibit makes much of Vermeer's context and the place of milkmaids in seventeenth-century Dutch culture, the real subject of the painting is light --- a clear and ravishing light that transforms, even if just for a moment, the utterly mundane into the utterly glorious.

Photo: Thanks