The Milkmaid
From $340
By room
Paintings for the kitchen
Small walls, steam, morning light. Domestic subjects at domestic scale — the room where small paintings shine.
Kitchens are the most honest room in the house and the hardest to decorate: little bare wall, lots of steam and grease, hard morning light. The paintings that work are small, domestic and tough — which describes the Dutch genre pictures exactly. Vermeer's Milkmaid is, not coincidentally, a painting of a kitchen.
Keep it small and keep it high enough to clean around: centre at 60–66 inches, clear of the splash zone behind the hob and out of the kettle's steam line. An oil painting on varnished canvas can be wiped; a glazed print cannot, and the glass will fog every morning forever.
The Goldfinch is the sleeper hit of this room — small, sharp, a bird on a chain at the end of a table, painted by Carel Fabritius in 1654 and instantly readable in a kitchen window's light.
Getting the size right
12 × 16 to 20 × 24 inches is the kitchen range. Anything bigger fights the cabinets.
Two small pieces — a still life and a flower study — hung as a pair suit a kitchen better than one medium piece.
The full method — measuring, hanging height, sightlines — is in the wall-size guide. Every painting on this page can be made to the size your wall actually needs; the price on each card is the published starting price for the smallest canvas.
Questions
Questions about this room
Steady humidity is fine; direct steam is not. Keep the canvas out of the plume above the hob and away from the kettle, wipe dust with a dry cloth, and it will not need attention for years.
Unframed gallery wrap. Fewer crevices for grease, no gilt to clean, and the painted edges suit the room's plainness.
Send us the wall instead of guessing
A photograph of the wall with a tape measure in it is enough. We will show any painting on this page at true scale in your room, free, before you decide.