67 pages • 2 hours read
Girl In Hyacinth Blue
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
The Color Blue
The color blue typically represents peace and tranquility. This is very often the case for many of the viewers of the painting, who seek out the color of the girl’s smock as a way of gaining wisdom and inspiration.
For example, Saskia finds the color vivid and brilliant, which takes her out of the dreary greys of her life. When she speaks of the baby’s mother, she equates it with the painting. In her imagination, the mother wears blue just as the girl in the painting does, as if that is something magnificent and unheard of. Saskia’s landscape is plain, her marriage is dull, and she sees the blue as something that can give her abundance and joy. Even at the end, though she has sold the painting, she remembers the color blue and buys blue wool so she can make scarves for each of her children and bring color into their lives.
Claudine (whose chapter is titled “Hyacinth Blue”) is also enamored of the blue in the painting, especially the superficial aspects of the imagery rather than, as some of the characters, with the deeper meanings it reveals. When she first receives the painting from her husband, she places it in “the small drawing room, above a blue velvet chaise that intensified the blue of the girl’s smock…” 85). She likens the blue to the color of spring hyacinths and later equates it with the excitement of her affair. She orders hyacinths (that never come), for the day of her small concert. For Claudine, the spring hyacinth is the color of hope.
Landscape
Landscape is a very important motif in the novel. In some of the stories, the landscape becomes a character, with its fickle and irregular moods. In Saskia’s story, as well as Adriaan's story, the rains precede a broken heart. In Saksia’s case, her heart breaks for the painting even as she sells it to save her marriage. For Adriaan, the weather becomes symbolic of the murky waters of society and its cruel constructs as well as the confusion of the love he experiences. For Claudine, living in The Hague is claustrophobic, and the landscape mirrors her discontent.
The author creates the landscape of the Netherlands as an important aspect to the personality of the characters. For example, when Magdalena climbs up to the sentry posts of the city walls, she feels inspired by the beauty of the landscape: “The world from that vantage point stretched so grandly. Up there, beauty was more than color and shapes, but openness, light, the air itself, and because of that, it seemed untouchable” (229).
It is a testament to Vreeland’s love and familiarity of the landscape that she brings the patterns and ornamentations of the surrounding countryside to the book. It is as if, with the stroke of her pen, she is actually painting the scene for readers through her writing, and thereby bringing forth the beauty of art not just on the canvas, but as an expression of place.
The Painting
The painting, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, plays the largest symbolic role in the novel. It is the key element that links each of the vignettes together as the author takes the reader on a journey that captures the moment the painting is created to the moment it is nearly destroyed.
The way the painting trades hands throughout time. While the painting is always of a girl wearing a blue smock looking out a window, it is also so many different things depending on who is looking at it. In this way, the author shows the reader how art is a living thing. Each owner of the painting imbues it with meaning. It is the symbol of a Nazi’s raid, or a commercial venture to help one move away. It is personal, as in Magdalena’s case, or impersonal, as in Vermeer’s case. The artist doesn’t view the painting with any sentimentality. He sees his work as merely catching a moment in time. For Hannah, the painting symbolizes the transformation to womanhood, of a young girl who is misunderstood by her mother and grandmother, only to recognize her own power through the painting.
The painting is the one thing that retains its identity. All else around it is in a constant state of flux. Floods don’t destroy it, and neither does the Holocaust. It is a stalwart symbol of eternity. Art, the painting suggests symbolically, never dies. A painting is two things at once: It enters the heart of the one who sees it and becomes something new. And yet, it always stays the same.
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