About The Milkmaid
Johannes Vermeer painted The Milkmaid around 1658 in Delft, in the Dutch Republic. A kitchen maid stands by a window, slowly pouring milk from a jug into an earthenware bowl. On the table in front of her are bread, a basket and a blue jug. The moment is ordinary, but the picture is full of concentration and calm.
Vermeer was a master of light. Daylight from the window on the left falls across the maid’s face, the white wall and the crusty bread, which he painted with tiny dots of bright paint so that it seems to glitter. The blue of her apron came from ultramarine, a costly pigment made from ground lapis lazuli. Look closely and you can see nails and nail holes in the wall, and a foot warmer on the floor beside a row of Delft tiles.
The painting is small, about 46 by 41 centimeters. It has belonged to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam since 1908.
Tips for this puzzle
The bare wall makes up much of the picture and is hard to piece together, so leave it for last. Begin with the maid’s yellow bodice and blue apron, the table and the window, which have the strongest colors and shapes.
Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, 1658. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain (PD-Art); image: commons.wikimedia.org. Image source. All image credits
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How to play
- Pick 12 to 150 pieces (up to 48 on a phone). Each piece count keeps its own puzzle, so you can switch and come back.
- Drag a piece into the frame. Drop it close to where it belongs and it clicks into place and stays there.
- Outside the frame, drop a piece next to one it fits and they join. A joined group moves as one, and clicks into the frame as one.
- Preview shows the whole painting faintly in the frame. Edges only hides every piece without a straight edge, so you can do the border first.
- Tidy lines up the loose pieces beside the frame, edge pieces first. Press it again to scatter them.
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Keyboard
Press Tab to go from piece to piece. The arrow keys move the piece one place at a time, lined up with the places in the frame, and Enter or Space drops it.
A jigsaw is a puzzle about seeing shapes and colors, so there’s no way to play it with a screen reader. We’re sorry about that.
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