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Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue
adapted for television
When a work of art gets a hold of one’s heart and imagination, it can be difficult to shake. This is not, however, a bad thing like an inane commercial jingle getting stuck on an endless tape loop in the mind’s ear. It is a good thing to be haunted by the likes of Picasso’s Guernica or an O’Keeffe iris. For me, the work of Johannes Vermeer has always been hard to shake. That I’m not alone in this is clear, especially in light of the novels and poems inspired by his work. One of those, Susan Vreeland’s compelling novel Girl in Hyacinth Blue, has been adapted for television by the Hallmark Hall of Fame, and will air on the CBS television network on February 2, 2003.
Vreeland’s novel tells, in reverse chronological order, the story of a purported Vermeer painting from its present-day owner to its origin in Vermeer’s seventeenth-century studio. It is a fascinating novel about the provenance of art, but it is, even more, the story of a painting’s hold on a number of people in different countries and centuries, and the role it played in their lives.
Richard Russo adapted the novel for television. Despite the unfortunate re-titling to the clichéd Brush with Fate, Russo’s script captures much of the novel’s color and nuance. Glenn Close is effective as the conflicted Cornelia, the current owner of the painting, who has thoroughly researched its difficult history without ever revealing the painting to anyone. She decides to show the painting to her colleague Richard, an anxiously soft-spoken art teacher played by Thomas Gibson, and the painting’s biography unfolds.
As we travel back in time with the picture of a girl wearing a hyacinth blue shawl, we see the hold it has on the people who own and encounter it. It is a visible sign of memory and loss for Laurens; an emblem of beauty and possibility for Saskia, a farmwife stranded in a flooded Dutch farmhouse; it is material salvation for the orphaned infant son of Aletta, hanged as a witch. For Vermeer himself, the painting is his reason for being, even while it simultaneously holds his family together and tears it apart.
Cornelia saves for last the story of the shameful circumstances under which her father acquired the painting -- circumstances that gave birth to the extensive eccentricities required for her to be able to keep, for so long, a terrible but exquisite secret.
Brush with Fate has its shortcomings, but is by and large a satisfying adaptation. Visually lovely, evoking a sense of Vermeer’s light and color, it also manages to keep in its sights the mystery that is art and the way art can take hold of us across the centuries.
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