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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 256
Printing Date: October 01, 2000
Publishing house: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sale Popularity Level: 18891
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Product Description:
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. 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.
Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishing houses Weekly, the Christian Science Monitor, and the San Francisco Chronicle
Nominated for the Book Sense Book of the Year
Amazon.com Review:
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 very 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 subsequent 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 very 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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Rated by buyers 
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This was the latest selection of the book club I belong to. I have to say it's my favorite book so far (we've been together for 4 years). It has depth, sincerity and is beautifully written.
Rated by buyers -
Have you ever picked up an old, old article and wondered about the story behind it? Have you looked at beautiful art and wondered about that? Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a novel which traces the fictional provenance of a painting by Vermeer backwards from it's current owner to the time the artist was inspired to paint it.
The style reminds me of a group of storytellers sitting around a table, each picking up where the other leaves off, and each telling a very different, sometimes very dramatic rendering of an object's journey through time. Yet all are tied together by a fascination and a reverance for the skill of the artist and the subject of his work.
A young girl sees,"The face of the girl in the painting almost glowed, her blue eyes, cheeks, the corners of her mouth all bright and glossy, the light coming right at her across the space between them. She seemed more real than the people in the room."
And so this precious painting comes into their home for a short intelude before their lives are ended and the spoils go to the victor. Much, much earlier, the carefully wrapped painting is discovered in a boat along with a newborn child during a flood. "Sell the painting. Feed the child," are the words written on the back of an art document.
And so we are drawn back to the very moment of inspiration. This is a gentle, lovely tale of how a thing of beauty can affect the lives of many.
by Judith Helburn
for StorycircleBookReviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women
Rated by buyers -
Is it a Vermeer or isn't it?
That is the thread that holds these eight short stories together.
Susan Vreeland takes us on a journey back in time that starts with the current owner of a beautiful painting thought to be one of the lost paintings of the Dutch artist Vermeer.
As we approach each sub-story we travel back a little further in time to each previous owner of the painting and how owning it has affected their lives. Set mostly in Holland and The Netherlands the Dutch names for places can be a bit difficult to pronounce but do not detract from the overall power of this small book.
Each individual story line is easy to follow. My only question would be what ultimately happens to the current owner of the painting (who is afraid to show it to the world since his father obtained it through his position with the German police during WW II).
I highly recommend this book.
Marion Marchetto
Rated by buyers 
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Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a series of vignettes chronicling the reverse history of a fictional Vermeer painting of the same name. Vreeland's colorful portraits of Dutch life, from the wealthy to the poorest peasants, spanning several hundred years, are fascinating. I wouldn't have minded delving further into each of the tales, and the only other thing that could have improved the book was if the painting, which plays a silent, starring role in each of the stories, really existed.
GiHB was enjoyable, but was a small disappointment after Vreeland's breathtaking Luncheon of the Boating Party.
Rated by buyers -
While this book was written beautifully; her research evident in all the stories, I didn't care for it. I was expecting another "Girl With A Pearl Earring." Even though it was brilliant the way all the stories led from one to the next, I would have preferred one long story. Vreeland is an excellent writer, I don't have complaints in that department, nor in any departmnt; it just wasn't my cup of tea. What it did do, however, is make me more curious about Vermeer's work. I plan to look up his paintings and enjoy his beautiful talent.
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