Girl in Hyacinth Blue

Susan Vreeland’s occasionally exquisite novel Girl in Hyacinth Blue traces the heritage of a painting believed to be by Vermeer in eight discrete, reverse-chronological chapters. Beginning with Cornelius, a late-twentieth-century professor at an American boys’ school, and moving backwards to the painting’s subject in seventeenth-century Holland, the book uses the painting to investigate the role of art and beauty in a variety of societies; the ability of a physical object to outlive its creator by centuries; and the question of whether the inherent aesthetic and emotional value of a painting can be separated from its material and historical value as the work (or not) of a master.

The first chapter is narrated by Richard, Cornelius’s art teacher colleague. Cornelius invites Richard to his apartment to show him the painting, insisting it is a Vermeer but refusing to have it appraised or show it to anyone else. It emerges that Cornelius’s Nazi father looted it from a Dutch Jewish family he deported to a concentration camp during WWII.  The guilt of keeping his father’s secret has warped Cornelius’s adult life, preventing him from sharing the painting with anyone (until now) and even from making any close friends. Cornelius even considers burning the painting, as an act either of atonement or erasure of the past. On the one hand, the thought of destroying an undiscovered, unrecorded Vermeer is legitimately spine-chilling. On the other, it seems almost too easy and contrived to pit the epitome of evil, the Nazis, against the incarnation of beauty, Vermeer.

The narrative then moves backwards in time to the Jewish family in Amsterdam who owned the painting before Cornelius’s father, and continues to trace its heritage as it moves around the Netherlands. There are some unexpectedly lovely descriptions of the Dutch countryside, but some of the little girls and young wives aching for beauty in a bleak existence failed to assert themselves as distinct characters. I liked a cynical, materialistic French diplomat’s wife who committed adultery under the eyes of the painting and then sold it to buy passage back to Paris, giving the seller the wrong artist’s name to raise its price; her regret over rendering the painting “illegitimate” by distancing it from its true parent is an interesting and telling contrast to her blithe indifference to her and her husband’s mutual infidelities. She reflects, “How love builds itself unconsciously out of the momentous ordinary,” a phrase that echoes a recurring theme of the importance of contemplation and the appreciation of the small details before you. This entreaty, along with the necessity of beauty and art even in a life struggling for survival, supports a value system I agree with and enjoy reading about, and initially I loved the way the Vermeer was a stand-in for all art. For some reason, perhaps unfairly, my appreciation was slightly diminished by learning that the author is planning several other books about artists (she teaches art history as well as writing). I’m not sure if it led me to question her true love for Vermeer (I was similarly discomfited to know she’d never seen a Vermeer face to face, though she’d read numerous books and gallery catalogues on his work), or to wonder if rather than seeing the painting as a metaphor for all art, I should have taken a narrower view on Vermeer’s specific talents and contributions. Fundamentally, of course, this speculation is irrelevant to the novel’s merits, but somehow it dampened my enthusiasm just the same.

Several of the chapters were initially written as stand-alone stories and published separately, and it wasn’t until Vreeland filled in the gaps in the narrative that she found herself with a novel on her hands. Although later chapters explicitly answer plot questions raised in earlier chapters, I felt the book failed to build on itself in a more fundamental way, and that each chapter existed separately. I also felt that several of the characters had similar voices and experiences with the painting, and wish she had explored a broader range of reactions and characters. The French woman was merrily amoral, but still able to, at the last, appreciate the innocence and purity of the painting; several of the other stories could have benefited from that level of complexity and ambiguity.