The color blue typically represents peace and tranquility. This is very often the case for many of the viewers of the painting, who seek out the color of the girl’s smock as a way of gaining wisdom and inspiration.

For example, Saskia finds the color vivid and brilliant, which takes her out of the dreary greys of her life. When she speaks of the baby’s mother, she equates it with the painting. In her imagination, the mother wears blue just as the girl in the painting does, as if that is something magnificent and unheard of. Saskia’s landscape is plain, her marriage is dull, and she sees the blue as something that can give her abundance and joy. Even at the end, though she has sold the painting, she remembers the color blue and buys blue wool so she can make scarves for each of her children and bring color into their lives.

Claudine (whose chapter is titled “Hyacinth Blue”) is also enamored of the blue in the painting, especially the superficial aspects of the imagery rather than, as some of the characters, with the deeper meanings it reveals. When she first receives the painting from her husband, she places it in “the small drawing room, above a blue velvet chaise that intensified the blue of the girl’s smock…” 85).