Girl in Hyacinth Blue: Summary 5

When I read the rest of Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland, I thought that it was a great way to end the book. I finally found out the whole story and journey of the painting. It started off with an artist named Johannes. He went over to his friend Pieter Claesz van Ruijven's house, which had a ton of art in it since Pieter was an artist. Pieter was deciding on what to paint next. Pieter insisted on painting another portrait of a girl alone in a room, but Johannes thought that there was too much of that already. Johannes said,"Why does the world need another painting of a woman alone in a room? Or a hundred more paintings?" Pieter replied, "The world doesn't know that it needs yet," (page 204.) On leaving Pieter's house, Jan (Johannes) bumps into his second oldest daughter Magdalena. She was going to the town walls, and she asked her father to join her. He refused, and started to think about how he lived "badly," and did not appreciate the time spent with her. Instead, he bought a pitcher to bring home. When he got home, he saw his whole family in a riot with his uncle beating his oldest daughter, Catharina, with a stick and his other children screaming. I guess that the uncle was crazy, because when asked what happened, he talked about the "she-devil." That is when Magdalena came in, and Jan was in awe. "She stood before him as if offered by God. The blue cloth of her smock draped like billowy sky. There was something in this girl he could never grasp, an inner life inscrutable to him....Was it possible to paint with good conscience what he didn't understand?" (pages 220-221.) This is the point in the story where we realize that Magdalena is the girl in the painting, and that she is the one who changed so many people's lives by just looking at the painting: the painting that told how life is. "That stillness today, he thought, might be all he would ever know of the Kingdom of Heaven." (page 223.) And that is when Johannes realized that Pieter was right, and that there might be room for another painting of a girl sitting in a room. The last chapter in the book was all about the girl in the marvelous painting: Magdalena. Growing up, she always wished to paint with as much grace as her father did. She never thought that she was beautiful, either, which was wrong because so many people loved how she looked. She always thought that so many people, in the paintings especially, were so much more pretty than she was, and had so much more meaning: "She thought of all the paintings she has seen...Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her." (page 242.) This is very ironic because Magdalena is feeling the same way about the people she sees in paintings that people in the future feel about the painting with her in it. That just makes you feel that even if you feel alone, you are not alone, because there is always someone feeling the same way that you do; even in paintings. That just makes you feel all warm and full inside to know that. This painting affected so many people, from Cornelius to Hannah to Laurens to Digna to Claudine to Saskia, and they all felt the same exact way that Magdalena felt. That is just extraordinary to think about something like that; that you are never alone. And it turns out, that after all those people unknowing of the maker of this work of art, the painting was a Vermeer. This is because Vermeer's first name was Johannes, and Johannes was the man who painted the portrait. Isn't that just a cool way of ending a story? To find out something that you have been searching for throughout the entire novel? I thought that this was a fantastic book, and it taught me how so many people feel the same way about things, and that you are never alone in the world. I enjoyed reading this alot, so thank you for having us do this assignment.