he luminescence of her eye."From this haunting first chapter, the book moves backward in time to the previous owners of the painting. In each new house, all the way back to Vermeer's, it assumes a new meaning.For little Hannah in Amsterdam, the girl in the blue dress is a model of pensive contemplation amid the rising tide of anti-Semitism. Hannah is burdened with a profound sense that she and her family are living, as Emily Dickinson put it, "between the heaves of storm." In this stunning chapter, nothing more violent than the death of a pigeon takes place, but the horizon glows with horror.Further back, the painting belonged to a man who loved it as a memory of the love he foolishly lost. For an earlier owner, it's an emblem of the daughter she cannot bear.Caught in what Vreeland calls "the excruciating complexities" of life, each owner relinquishes the Vermeer only as a last resort. One desperate young man wraps his newborn son with the painting and leaves it on a boat near a flooded house. The note reads, "Sell the painting. Feed the baby."Vreeland's study of "Girl in Hyacinth Blue" illuminates the hopes and fears we invest in beautiful objects. "In the end," the narrator notes, "it's only the moments that we have." But what exquisite moments they are in this thoughtful book.Girl In Hyacinth Blue - How different owners express feelings toward artEssay written by: bigshaggyArt renders the extraordinary brilliance of peoples’ lives. Susan Vreeland's lovely Girl in Hyacinth Blue brings together an artfully constructed reversed chronological novel. A kind of contemporary hiding-place of a painting credited to Vermeer all the way back to the moment the work was fathered. The purpose of art is to provide a sense of grace and fulfillment to the heart and soul. Vermeer's paintings speak so powerfully, nearly four centuries after their creation, of the mysteries of character and time and of the unimportant details that make up a life. ...
