Girl in Hyacinth Blue
by Susan Vreeland
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Book Summary Information
Author: Susan VreelandEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-10-01
ISBN: 014029628X
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Girl in Hyacinth Blue
Book Review: The Power of Beauty
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the story of how beauty affects those around them. The main character is a long lost painting of a young girl, barely into her teens, sewing, but also staring out a window and daydreaming. About what? Would she like to be out and about instead of confined to her domestic duties? Is this a Vermeer painting? Vermeer was known for painting quiet domestic scenes. This seems to be a search for beauty among the ordinary, the joy of life or joyex d'vivre as the French would say.
Some of the paintings owners would have like to keep it, but weren't able to.
The present owner of the girl's paiinting was a strange mathematic teacher in a private boys' school. He shows it to an art teacher, another of the schools' instructors and tells him how he obtained it. The painting is kept hidden in the teachers' house and the only one to know about it is the art teacher. The math teachers' father has left it to him. The man was a low ranking Nazi officer who stole it from a Jewish family when they were sent to a concentration camp. The painting was akways to be kept secret.
The next story deals with a man whose wife wants to give the painting to his daughter and her soon to be husband as a wedding gift. Laurens doesn't want to part with it. He was busy watching his daughter and his soon to be son-in-law together and is jealous of their youth and new beginning in life. He confesses to his wife that the girl in the painting reminds him of the long lost love of his youth. He treated his love badly so she left him wanting to never hear from him again. Digne gets over her anger and tells Laurens to be happy for who he now is. Digne keeps the painting and the couple realizes how lucky they are to have each other in their later stage of life.
Then further back in time a French woman steals the painting from her husband and sells it in order to pay for her trip back home to France. She does not like the Netherlands, it is too provincial, she is tired of her cheating husband, she does not like the lifestyle of this country, and she wants to go home. So she does.
Further back in time, possibly in the year 1717. The dykes have flooded the countryside close to the ocean. A family is living on an island surrounded by water. This is their home now, a mother, father, a boy and a girl. Then a basket containing a baby and the painting has been placed in their boat. Who is the baby? Who is the girl in the painting? Could the girl be the baby's mother? The home she lived in seemed to be a wealthy one. The housewife looks at the painting and wished her home was so fine. But hers was crowded and wet animals and everything else crammed into little space. The family decided they would have to sell the painting in order to be able to live. The mother would have loved to keep it, but couldn't. Food was more important than beauty. So off she goes, gets into her boat, floats to shore and goes from town to town trying to sell the painting until she gets a decent price. The painting had been stolen by a young man from the home of his aunt. Why?
At the same time a witch was hanged for killing her child.
The mystery ends at the close of the book. The reader finds out who the girl is and who the artist is who painted her portrait.
This is a great and different way to tell a story begining with the present and ending back to about 1670-73, a time of approximately 300 years. The story is beautifully told, with good and well writen sense of time and place.and also good characterization.
There is a video about the story of 'The Girl in Hycinth Blue.' This video made me want to read the book. Both are done excellently.
Summary of Girl in Hyacinth Blue
This luminous story begins in the present day, when a professor invites a colleague to his home to see a painting that he has kept secret for decades. The professor swears it is a Vermeer?but why has he hidden this important work for so long? The reasons unfold in a series of events that trace the ownership of the painting back to World War II and Amsterdam, and still further back to the moment of the work's inspiration. As the painting moves through each owner's hands, what was long hidden quietly surfaces, illuminating poignant moments in multiple lives. Susan Vreeland's characters remind us, through their love of this mysterious painting, how beauty transforms and why we reach for it, what lasts and what in our lives is singular and unforgettable.
There are only 35 known Vermeers extant in the world today. In Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland posits the existence of a 36th. The story begins at a private boys' academy in Pennsylvania where, in the wake of a faculty member's unexpected death, math teacher Cornelius Engelbrecht makes a surprising revelation to one of his colleagues. He has, he claims, an authentic Vermeer painting, "a most extraordinary painting in which a young girl wearing a short blue smock over a rust-colored skirt sat in profile at a table by an open window." His colleague, an art teacher, is skeptical and though the technique and subject matter are persuasively Vermeer-like, Engelbrecht can offer no hard evidence--no appraisal, no papers--to support his claim. He says only that his father, "who always had a quick eye for fine art, picked it up, let us say, at an advantageous moment." Eventually it is revealed that Engelbrecht's father was a Nazi in charge of rounding up Dutch Jews for deportation and that the picture was looted from one doomed family's home:
That's when I saw that painting, behind his head. All blues and yellows and reddish brown, as translucent as lacquer. It had to be a Dutch master. Just then a private found a little kid covered with tablecloths behind some dishes in a sideboard cabinet. We'd almost missed him.By the end of "Love Enough," this first of eight interrelated stories tracing the history of "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," the painting's fate at the hands of guilt-riddled Engelbrecht fils is in question. Unfortunately, there is no doubt about the probable destiny of the previous owners, the Vredenburg family of Rotterdam, who take center stage in the powerful "A Night Different From All Other Nights." Vreeland handles this tale with subtlety and restraint, setting it at Passover, the year before the looting, and choosing to focus on the adolescent Hannah Vredenburg's difficult passage into adulthood in the face of an uncertain future. In the next story, "Adagia," she moves even further into the past to sketch "how love builds itself unconsciously ... out of the momentous ordinary" in a tender portrait of a longtime marriage. Back and back Vreeland goes, back through other owners, other histories, to the very inception of the painting in the homely, everyday objects of the Vermeer household--a daughter's glass of milk, a son's shirt in need of buttons, a wife's beloved sewing basket--"the unacknowledged acts of women to hallow home." Girl in Hyacinth Blue ends with the painting's subject herself, Vermeer's daughter Magdalena, who first sends the portrait out into the world as payment for a family debt, then sees it again, years later at an auction.
She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.In this final passage, Susan Vreeland might be describing her own masterpiece as well as Vermeer's. --Alix Wilber
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