Susan Vreeland, author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, (Penguin Books, 2000) was an internationally known author of art-related historical fiction who, after a long and notable literary career, died in 2017. A New York Times bestseller, the novel was originally published in 1999 by McMurray and Beck, but subsequent editions were published by Penguin Books. The novel’s popularity gave rise to a 2003 Hallmark Hall of Fame production based on the novel. The painting in the book is not a “real” Vermeer, but a Vermeer imagined by the author. To that end, for the production, American painter, Jonathan Jansen painted an original work of art based on descriptions of the painting in the book using Vermeer’s particular techniques.

The novel, about an assumed Jan Vermeer painting that makes the rounds of its various owners throughout the years, garnered much praise and many awards and nominations. In 1999, it was a Book Sense book of the year finalist, and was nominated, in 2001, for the International Dublin Literary award. Forward magazine called it the “Best Novel of the Year” and shortly after its publication, Girl in Hyacinth Blue won the San Diego Book Awards’ Theodor Geisel Award and best novel of the year. 

During her accomplished profession as a historical author, Vreeland had a 30-year career as a high school teacher in San Diego, while also writing articles and essays for newspapers and magazines. Her fiction appeared in many distinguished literary journals including the Missouri Review, Ploughshares and Conjunctions. She once wrote, in reference to her passion for art and history, “To me, even secular places such as museums and ruins were imbued with the sacred. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, religious and social history—I was swept away with all of it, wanting to read more, to learn languages, to fill my mind with rich, glorious, long-established culture wrought by human desire, daring, and faith.”

Plot Summary

Girl in Hyacinth Blue is told in reverse chronology; a series of eight chapters beginning in the recent present (early 2000s) and going back in time to the mid-17th century. Each chapter in the series is a complete short story, with its own plot, containing individual, character-driven conflicts and resolutions. The reverse chronology shows how and when the painting changed hands over time. Each story is held together by a single overarching theme: a Jan Vermeer painting called Girl in Hyacinth Blue and the power art has over its audience.

The novel traces the lives of those who owned the painting and that of the man who painted it, and it reveals the conditions of their lives and how they came to have the painting. Above and beyond the little lives of those who once held the painting, the author reveals her premise; that art itself is something that transcends time and place and the workaday world of human life.

In the eight stories, characters reveal their greed and their love for the work. In the first chapter, a teacher keeps the painting hidden because he knows his father stole it from the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In the second chapter, a young Jewish girl identifies with the girl in the painting as the horror of the Holocaust descends on Europe. Heading back further in the time, the third story shows the struggles of married life, when a husband admits the girl in the painting reminds him of his first love. Before that, the painting is in the hands of a wealthy woman who is having an affair. After the affair destroys her marriage, she sells the painting to escape her husband.

In the fifth story, a flood nearly destroys a Dutch town. When a painting and a baby float up to a house in a small boat, the woman who lives there with her husband and children takes the baby in as her own. In the next chapter, an engineering student falls in love with a young woman—an outcast—and the woman gets pregnant. She delivers twins but kills the girl because the infant has a hare lip. The engineering student takes the remaining twin, a boy, and the painting from his aunt’s house; he puts them in the boat, hoping to save both. Before that, in the next story, Vermeer struggles to support his family with his art. One day, his daughter Magdalena throws a tantrum. He calms her by asking her to sit for him and, a dreamy artist herself, Magdalena complies. The result is Girl in Hyacinth Blue.

In the final story, Magdalena dreams of painting, and of living fully and completely in a world that is big and beautiful, but she ends up marrying and tied to the house, cleaning and cooking just as she had always done as a child. Nonetheless, she marvels over the fact that people would be moved by her depiction in a painting, and understands the immortality of art.