Description

This is an auction for GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE by Susan Vreeland.

"Vreeland's wonderful novel is made of stories, each delving farther into the provenance of a Vermeer painting. A high-school math teacher confides to a colleague that he owns (and adores) a painting of a girl sewing at a window that he knows is a Vermeer. All the evidence of technique, colour, subject is there, yet the painting lacks documentation to validate its authenticity: nor will the math teacher, one Cornelius Engelbrecht, tell just how it became his. The reader is more privileged, though, and learns quickly that Engelbrecht's Nazi father stole it in 1940 from a doomed Jewish family in Amsterdam. Such reader-privilege becomes an overwhelming emotional test when Vreeland goes back to visit that family, in that year, just before the theft. Farther back still, a happily married Dutch couple owns the painting and when the husband admits that the girl in it reminds him of an earlier lover, the marriage is briefly shaken. Set when Beethoven's Eroica symphony was new, Hyacinth Blues offers a biting bit of social satire and lets the reader discover just how the painting's papers did in fact get lost. Still deeper back goes Vreeland, taking up with masterful insight, feeling, and control the life of a small Dutch farm family caught in the great flood of 1717; of a young engineer who loves, loses (pathetically), and hands on the painting; of Vermeer himself as he paints the picture, struggling against debt, father of 11; and, in a wondrous, bittersweet epiphany, of the daughter herself whom Vermeer chose as his model. This is extraordinarily skilled historical fiction: deft, perceptive, full of learning, deeply moving."