Reader Review: “Girl in Hyacinth Blue”

by Cathryn Conroy (Gaithersburg, Maryland): Oh, how clever and creative! Written by Susan Vreeland, this is the story of a painting—ostensibly by the renowned Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer—and all the people who have owned it over the decades since it was painted sometime in the 1600s. Even though this is a novel, each chapter is more like a short story as we share in the tale of the painting’s owners from the present day and extending back to the time when Vermeer painted his lovely daughter Magdalena, including why he chose this scene and what she was thinking about while her father painted.

The opening chapter is startling and disturbing. The owner of the painting, Corneilius Engelbrecht, is a high school math teacher, who has closed himself off to the rest of the world, all because of the painting. He knows it has come to him under the most horrifying of circumstances, and he lives in fear he will be found out and the beautiful painting snatched away. Each subsequent story reaches further back in time about the various owners, some of whom are desperately poor and others of whom are wealthy and deceitful. But they all have one thing in common: The painting has in some way affected or even transformed their lives.

This imaginative and impressive book is as much a story about humanity as it is about the provenance of a painting, albeit a fictional one, and the impact art has on our souls.

Bonus: The painting is just a figment of Susan Vreeland’s imagination, but when Hallmark made a film of the novel, it commissioned artist Jonathan Janson to paint it as Vreeland describes it in great detail in the book. Google “Girl in Hyacinth Blue Jonathan Janson” to see the extraordinary result. The Kindle cover is a smaller, cropped version of Janson’s painting, but it appears (at least on Amazon) that the hardcover and paperback versions do not have the painting on the cover.