The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal

“Immensely rewarding . . . Ostler transforms history’s grand sweep into intimate profile.” Three sisters, the daughters of a prominent French Jewish family, all painted as children by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In the turbulent years from the Belle Epoque to World War II, one would marry an English aristocrat and escape; one would become a collaborator with the Nazis; one would die in Auschwitz. This is the remarkable hidden history of the lives behind Renoir’s beguiling portraits. Paris, 1881. The artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir knocks on the door of a wealthy Jewish family’s home in the 8th arrondissement, the grandest quarter of Paris. He has arrived to paint the portrait of the family’s two youngest daughters. The parents, the Cahen d’Anvers, are bankers, collectors, philanthropists, and pillars of Parisian society. They go to balls, breed racehorses, and ride in the Bois de Boulogne with their aristocratic friends. But for the Jewish community, the undercurrents of Parisian sentiment are already moving in a sinister direction.