Serendipity : Vermeer on my rice pudding

After a tiring walk in the Louvre, we came back to our hostel kitchen and we were having dinner. After seeing the Mona Lisa and the Renaissance gallery, I convinced my mom, my little brother and my little sister to go and have a look at Vermeer's work, the Lacemaker. Sitting at the kitchen, I was explaining why I had dragged them to see it and told them I had seen another Vermeer's work, the Milkmaid in Amsterdam. Speak of the devil, my sister asked me if the milkmaid looked like the one on the cover of her rice pudding pot, and guess what! Holy shit! It is exactly the same!

Vermeer's "Milkmaid" on a rice pudding pot

I had always been buying rice pudding of this brand for such a long time and I had never noticed it until then. Oh my god! Vermeer on my rice pudding! I wondered how many people knew about this. That feeling could only be understood by the first person who opened the Tutankhamun Tomb. I have to steal this phrase from Amelie Poulain because there is just no better way to describe the thrill. 

I first knew about Vermeer from a Youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kfeWpLry3U). The School of Life channel always produce interesting contents and this video is the first focusing on an artist. For short, Vermeer's works all focus on painting the mundane. I don't think I am able to explain Vermeer better than the narrator of the video, Hannah Roxburgh. She narrated multiple videos on this channel. By the way, she is charming with her brainy talk. With her soothing voice, I always forget what she has discussed about at the end of the video.

Milkmaid

My first glimpse at the Milkmaid was a coincidence too. I visited Amsterdam at the beginning of August 2015. The main purpose was to visit a friend of mine there and the second plan was to smoke weed and eat some mushrooms. Rijks museum was essentially a side trip. I didn't even know that it was in there. Not until that I picked up the brochure map after I had entered the Rijks that I realized the Milkmaid was so damn popular. You didn't even have to get a map or any direction to get to Vermeer. Simply follow the crowd and you would be there. For the lack of better word, the Milkmaid was the Mona Lisa of the Rijks. I went into Rijks blind but it turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

Lacemaker

After seeing the Lacemaker, it instantly became my favorite. What I like the most about it isn't the colour nor the style, none of those artistic mumbo jumbo. Where it is placed is what I like about it. It is situated at the third floor of the Louvre, almost at the end of an alleyway. It actually takes effort just to get there. Talking about the Louvre, people always go for Mona Lisa and the Venus of Milo first. Honestly, Louvre is huge and squeezing through the crowd in Renaissance gallery is exhausting enough. Most of the people just won't bother to check out a tiny painting so far away. Plus the relatively smaller size, the Lacemaker is so easily ignored under the shadow of Mona Lisa. But for me, it sits where it should always be. The analogy is strong, just like a hardworking blue collar is always ignored by our media nowadays. The blue collar in question is the lacemaker. She doesn't seem to give a shit about fame. She just continues to perfect her craft, quietly into eternity. I find that idea kinda poetic. It kinda reminds me of Camus' Sisyphus.

Come to think about it, Dutch Lady being called Dutch Lady makes so much sense now. Rarely you see things come in full circle in unexpected ways. I am delighted :)