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

Immensely rewarding...Ostler transforms historys grand sweep into intimate profile. The Washington Post

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 Renoirs beguiling portraits.

Paris, 1881. The artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir knocks on the door of a wealthy Jewish familys home in the 8th arrondissement, the grandest quarter of Paris. He has arrived to paint the portrait of the familys two youngest daughters. The parents, the Cahen dAnvers, 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. The story of the Renoir girls will end in the duplicity and the horror of the Second World War.

With an extraordinary cast of characters, from the girls themselves, their mothers lovers, a heroic British General; from the King of Spain to Dreyfus, Proust, and Maupassantthis is a story about one of the worlds most famous pictures, The Pink and the Blue. But really it is a story about Parisone that prefers to be hidden. With access to never-before-seen letters, diaries, and personal recollectionsit is a tale of privilege, beauty, and betrayal almost lost in the shimmering memory of a vanished world.