Getty Museum
A Maid Milking a Cow in a Barn
Creator
Gerard ter BorchDutch Artist · 1617–1681
All works by this person →The son of an established painter, Gerard ter Borch was encouraged from an early age to pursue a career in painting. At the age of fifteen, he went to Amsterdam to study painting; after three years he moved to Haarlem and was admitted to that city's painters' guild. For a year he traveled throughout Europe, working for various patrons in many of Europe's leading artistic centers. Ter Borch was one
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1652–1654
- Medium
- Oil on panel
- Culture
- Dutch
- Department
- Paintings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
In a barn, a young maid squats while milking a brown and white spotted cow. Standing nearby, another cow seems to be waiting its turn. Gerard ter Borch treated the routine chore of milking in a straightforward manner, rejecting the humorous themes often favored by seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters. He was especially skilled at rendering the textures and surfaces of objects like those found in the foreground: the roughly hewn stool, the wooden basin filled with water, the chipped ceramic crock, and the shiny metal hinges of the buckets. The painting's muted colors and subtle play of light are characteristic of Ter Borch's work.
The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Getty Museum and other institutions.