Edith Sobel will discuss Susan Vreeland's "Girl in Hyacinth Blue" and Tracy Chevalier's "Girl With a Pearl Earring."

More worrying is how Vreeland, the author of "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," tends to fetishize not the life of the artist but the artist's lifestyle.

In 2002, Janson was commissioned by the American Hallmark Hall of Fame to paint a hypothetical Vermeer for the television adaptation Brush with Fate, based on Susan Vreeland's best-selling novel Girl in Hyacinth Blue.

Two other well-received Vermeer-based novels are also selling well, "Girl in Hyacinth Blue" by Susan Vreeland, and "The Music Lesson" by Katharine Weber.

One thinks of Tracy Chevalier's "Girl With a Pearl Earring," Deborah Moggach's "Tulip Fever," Susan Vreeland's "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," Sheri Holman's "Dress Lodger" and Rose Tremain's "Music & Silence."

What brings this to mind is Susan Vreeland's "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," a concise novel that follows the influence of what may have been a lost Vermeer portrait on several generations of lives starting in present day America and hurtling back to the 17th-century Netherlands.

In the last six years, many others have mined this golden age: think of "Girl in Hyacinth Blue" by Susan Vreeland, "Girl With a Pearl Earring" by Tracy Chevalier and "Tulip Fever" by Deborah Moggach.

Her novel also joins a crop of recent, painterly fictions, including Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever and Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue.

The film was based on Girl In Hyacinth Blue, a novel by author Susan Vreeland, and starred Glenn Close and Ellen Burstyn.