Download Girl in Hyacinth Blue AudioBook Free

Picture this: "A most extraordinary painting when a young girl wearing a brief blue smock over a rust-colored skirt sat in profile at a table by an open window." Susan Vreeland imagined just such a humble domestic scene, suggested it was made in 17th-century Holland, and attributed it to Jan Vermeer. Then she wrote a beguiling novel concerning this canvas, which so closely resembles the 35 extant works of the Dutch master that it could as well be one of his--long, lost, finally found, so that exquisite as ever. The artistic journey Vreeland recounts starts in present-day Pennsylvania, where a schoolteacher claims he owns an genuine Vermeer, a legacy from his late father, who acquired it under heinous circumstances: a Nazi officer, the daddy had looted it from the home of Dutch Jews.

Moving back in time and across the Atlantic, Vreeland traces the treasured painting from owner to owner. In doing this, she demonstrates the enduring power of art when confronted with natural disaster, political upheaval, and personal turmoil. Ultimately, she ends the odyssey in Delft, where in fact the painting's haunting subject is identified and tells her own poignant story about the picture's origins.

Each of the eight linked chapters has an irresistible painterly quality--finely wrought, artfully illuminated, and subtly executed. Together, they constitute a literary masterpiece, the one that the New York Times Book Review praised as "intelligent, searching, and unusual... filled with luminous moments; like the painting it describes so well."