Girl In Hyacinth Blue

“Still the evidence was in the museums—the similarities were undeniable. He flew home, hoarding conviction like a stolen jewel.” 

The simile at the end of this quote, “like a stolen jewel” is important; Cornelius “hoarding” conviction is emblematic of his need to be right that this painting is a Vermeer. It also tells readers something about his personality; he is greedy and covetous. After flying to Amsterdam to find some kind of proof, he convinces himself that the other Vermeers prove his is genuine. Somehow, as the stealing of a Jewel connotes, Cornelius can continue to love this painting, despite its theft from a Jewish home during the Holocaust. Hoarders, the word implies, are not conscious of what they hoard because greed interferes with common sense and personal ethics.

“Like a moulting snake, his father made pathetic efforts to shed the skin of sin in order to get down to the marrow of his innocence in time.” 

The essence of this quote lies in the final three words, “innocence of time.” Cornelius’ father, who in the simile is comparable to a snake, can only claim innocence if he justifies his actions in the context of the time. He portrays himself as a victim of Naziism. His excuses vary: everyone was joining the party, he wanted to make friends, it was something that happened then and was, therefore, excusable because of the times. It’s ironic that Cornelius would deride his father for not seeing the truth when he has become corrupted himself, finding excuses for keeping the stolen painting.

“She watched that last free flapping of wings as the bird rose over the peeked roofs to his home in Antwerp. Escape that was no escape. Antwerp, Amsterdam—what difference did it make?” 

This quote has many interpretations: It foreshadows the approaching Nazis and the destruction they will bring as well as Hannah’s own personal freedom. She seeks no destination, but only transformation. The double meaning makes this quote powerful because it speaks to two ideas that would, if separated, contradict each other.

“Her face told her she probably wanted something so deep or so remote that she never dared breathe it but was thinking about it there by the window. And not only wanted. She was capable of doing some great wild loving things. Yes, oh yes.”

Hannah is misunderstood. She looks to the painting of the girl for inspiration and identification. She recognizes her own silence and watchfulness in the girl who sits at the window looking out, but she also sees something powerful in the girl; the ability to perform a great act of love. It is this inspiration that becomes the key motivation for Hannah’s brave duty of killing the pigeons. She knows her father can’t do it, and she understands that by taking that burden from him, she is fulfilling the inspiration she finds from the girl in the painting.

“Watching her candlelight illuminate the girl in the painting, she knew why this night was different from all other nights. Real living had begun.” 

Hannah recognizes something as yet unexpressed in the girl’s face. She studies the painting frequently, believing the girl is capable of powerful actions. When Hannah takes this belief, bestowed onto her by the painting, and puts it into action, she symbolically brings the next act of the painted girl’s life alive. She also finds that she is finally living and that love is the essence of a just life. It is ironic that she says “life has begun” on a Passover night commemorating the Israelites’ freedom from Egyptian slavery on the cusp of the Holocaust’s encroachment on Dutch territory.

“To Laurens, everything about the couple ahead bore the conspicuous marks of euphoria. Too soon blooming, he thought, too soon coming into seed. They had not suffered long winter evenings of soulful contemplation but were careening ahead as if it were already tulip time.” 

Here, Laurens compares his daughter’s relationship it to his own long marriage and to the difficulties that he couldn’t foresee when he and Digna were first married. We can only understand, in retrospect, that this quote signals irony. His daughter’s buoyant romance must remind Laurens of the past, and the loss of the girl he favored after he made the mistake of standing her up. It reminds him of his ego and the ignorance with which he ruined his first chance at love, so the only thing he can do to stave off the feelings, is to bemoan what is otherwise a beautiful match between his daughter and her betrothed. Only when he realizes how complete his marriage is, can he accept the youthful love of his daughter and future son-in-law.

“And they passed a place in their lives, he thought, where all these things, skiffs, gardens, dry land, love—could be maintained without conscious effort.” 

This quote demonstrates the naivete and the continued ignorance of Laurens’ notions of love and marriage. He is not aware, until probably just this moment, that he knows very little about love and the long- term effort it takes. He begins to realize that he has made a mistake, talking to Digna about his first love, but he isn’t yet clear that he is driving his side of the marriage by nothing more than ego. 

“In the end, it’s only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk, or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.” 

This quote likely reflects the author’s sensibilities just as much as the characters’. Living in small moments and seeing the larger world in something as small as a grain of sand is the essence of art and thus the essence of living. The author repeats this refrain throughout the book, most notably in the Vermeer chapter, as if to remind the reader that art and love are captured not in their totality but in their moments. 

“Now he knew, as he’d known a hundred nights when he looked at the smoothly painted upturned hand before he took the lamp upstairs, that there was nothing so vital as paying attention and perfecting the humble offices of love.” 

This quote offers one of the best examples of a traditional style love story with its attendant happy ending. It is also reminiscent of the poem by Robert Hayden titled, “Those Winder Sundays” in which the poet reflects on “love’s austere and lonely offices.” In the beginning of this story, Laurens has little understanding of what love really is and what it really entails to be a good partner. It is only after his wife forgives him that he is open to the nature of love, which isn’t something that he lost. Love is now, in this moment of his life, with the woman he married. 

“How love builds itself consciously, he thought, out of the momentous ordinary.” 

This quote is notable because of its inherent contradiction. How can the ordinary be momentous? But as Laurens discovers, love is found in the most innocuous places, at surprising times, in the most random ways, and it is acknowledging this that the ordinary becomes bigger than it would seem. Additionally, throughout the novel, the notion that love and life is only found in moments, becomes a frequent refrain.

“You should thank the blessed Virgin my dear, that God has spared you the uncharitable corset makers in The Hague.” 

Claudine is the character with the loudest personality and a ribald sense of humor. She is also notably deceitful, superficial, and unappreciative of art which we see when she wants to paint a string of pearls around the neck of the girl in the painting. In this quote, Claudine compares the provinciality of the The Hague to the sophistication of Paris. For Claudine, everything is fair game to criticize, even underwear.

“Therefore, what I had been taught to fear, I now embraced. Betrayal—his or mine, it didn’t matter—freed me.”

Claudine never wanted to be in that marriage. She hoped—tried her best—to believe that in an arranged marriage she would finally fall in love, but Claudine is married to extravagance in personality, society, and fashion. She isn’t a deep woman, nor will she allow herself to suffer. Betrayal, normally something that tears marriages apart, in this instance does the opposite. This irony further enhances the reader’s notion of Claudine as a woman with few scruples. 

“If there was anything to weep for, it wasn’t Gerard, or Monsieur Le C-, or even me. It was the painting, for now it would go forth through the years without its certification, an illegitimate child, and all illegitimacy whether of paintings or of children or of love ought to be a source of truer tears than any I could muster at parting.” 

As Claudine parts with the painting, she finally realizes its worth, at least to her. As a mirror, the painting without its papers reflects Claudine’s self-image: dishonest, inauthentic, especially in a loveless marriage. Even her tears, she admits, are fake. She suddenly understands that the girl in the painting would have sacrificed everything to be with her beloved. While the painting lacks papers to prove its authenticity (the first time the author makes clear that the painting is a Vermeer) the opposite is actually true. The reader knows that each character in the novel finds legitimacy in the painting in so far as it carries personal meaning. But Claudine, who can only leave her marriage by betraying her husband, cannot see herself as authentic. Here, she experiences a remarkable moment of self-recognition which, in the end, may be her first true examination of herself and her values.

“Morningshine she called it, for her grandmother had told her that paintings have names.” 

Saskia is a simple woman who lives in the country. When the baby and the painting both show up, unbidden, she sees it as divine intervention. She names the painting the way you would a child. When she sells it, she feels she must tell the buyer what she has named it. To her, it is a living thing, something worthy of a name. She can’t send it off without saying its name because names are important to her, whether it be for a painting or a child. 

“How glorious to drape oneself in blue—the blue of the sky, of Heaven, of the pretty little lake at Westerbork with the tiny, blue brooklime that grew along the banks, the blue of hyacinths and Delftware and all fine things.” 

For just a moment, Saskia feels the power of what it might mean to be rich and sophisticated as she gazes at the blue dress on the girl in the painting. She longs for a better, more sophisticated life. She knows that outwardly, her life is a good one, that her husband and babies need and love her, but she yearns for fine things. She is unable to sell the painting because can’t part with the dreams of a different life that it conjures. 

“Even though the pain of that lie would strike again at the discovery of each new beauty in the painting, truth would drive a wedge between them no tenderness could bridge.” 

Saskia crosses a threshold in her marriage from which there may be no coming back. Just like the teacher, Cornelius, Saskia is willing to allow her love for the painting to stand in the way of truth. This love for the painting and all it represents of an imagined better life, lures her from her filial duties, including using the seed potatoes. To her husband, this is the ultimate betrayal. She values the painting over not just the truth, but above her husband’s needs. Her betrayal all the worse since it also fills her husband with dread and fear to know that the seed potatoes are gone. 

“I had worn myself out squeezing some personal meaning out of Descartes, Spinoza and Erasmus and wanted instead to experience in action Descartes’s principle that science could master Nature for the benefit of mankind.”

This quote appears near the beginning of the story after Adriaan meets the woman who will become his lover. It foreshadows the coming events. Adriaan is tired of simply reading theory and wants to experience it as an eternal truth. Ironically, Nature overwhelms logic, science, and common sense in a spectacular way that ends with the execution of a young woman. 

“The rawness of the curve on her throat would not heal, but few there are who go through life unmarked.” 

This quote signals another foreshadowing moment as Adriaan thinks about the hardships of a life. Ironically, he doesn’t seem to include himself in the possibility that he can be hurt or scarred. It is not only his beloved who is ruined, but himself as well, by crossing boundaries in the social dynamic that should have never been crossed. He never believed that cavorting with society’s outcast would lead to such a result. This may best be understood in context of the arrogance he had to believe that he could defy all of society’s superstition and biases. 

“If I went to watch, I would live with the horror the rest of my life. If I didn’t, I would be forsaking her. Better memory than betrayal, I decided.” 

Almost in response to the previous characters in Chapters 4 and 5, the author chooses a different outcome for Adriaan. Instead of risking everything, including his dignity and his trustworthiness, Adriaan decides to do the honorable thing and be there for Aletta in her final moments of life. He speaks of his memory and the fact that if he did not perform what he believed was his duty, the memory of his betrayal would be far worse than the horror of the event. In this quote, as in similar instances where betrayal is a choice, the author once again demonstrates the difficult actions that those who have the painting must decide to take.

“He could not will himself to discover truths. But he could give himself over to a painting or a subject with devotion and ardor like the girl was doing, nosing down onto that curb, committing body and soul to her endeavor.” 

One of the author’s most prominent ideas is that life and beauty appear in moments, revealing the human condition. This is what Vermeer believes, too, as he struggles to capture the truth of any given person, place, or situation. He knows that his one gift as a painter lies in his ability to capture a moment in time. In so doing, Vermeer harnesses the larger experience of human endurance, dignity, and the heart and soul of humanity. 

“Yet if he did work fast, how could he produce paintings grounded in deep beds of contemplation, the only way living things could be stilled long enough to understand them? And wasn’t everything he painted—a breadbasket, a pitcher, a jewelry box, a copper pail—wasn’t it all living?” 

What becomes clear in the chapter devoted to the artist (the second clue that indeed the painting is a Vermeer) is that Vermeer is a tormented artist. He fought for his desire for quiet and isolation against his duties as a father and a husband. He laments his relationship with his daughter, Magdalena, because he never came to her without a distraction in his mind. This quote illustrates that he is tortured by the idea of not being able to paint fast enough to make money. He reasons that to do so would be to go against all that he believes. He rationalizes that the world doesn’t need one more painting with an object or a girl in it, but he also believes with his heart that this is precisely what the world needs—a moment of stillness, so that life can be examined without the hindrance of the passage of time. His lament is that such care with his work will keep him and his family poor.

“Wishes had the power to knock the breath out of her.” 

Magdalena lives on wishes and dreams. She wants nothing more than to paint, and yet as a girl, soon to be woman, mother and wife, her role is pre-ordained. Some of Magdalena’s wishes are small; that her sister stops crying, that the endless chores come to an end. But the bigger wishes are the ones that take her breath away both with the idea of making them come true, and the fact that they probably never will come true. The greatest wish, to paint, is the most unattainable.

“She loved him. Loved what he did with that hand, and even, she suspected, loved what he loved, though they had not spoken of it.”

Magdalena feels connected to her papa through a mutual love for art. They both live their lives with an artist’s sensibility, and though she has yet to try her hand at painting, uncertain if she ever will, she admires what he does and learns from it. The tragedy is that her father has no idea what she is like and can’t see it. In most cases, she is annoying and sometimes enigmatic. Magdalena’s papa is too self-absorbed and too tortured by his own gift as a paint to get to know her.