THE RENOIR GIRLS

Beyond the canvas.

Journalist and author Ostler begins her impressive biography with a famous Belle Epoque portrait, Pink and Blue (1881), painted by a struggling Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The painting depicts two Parisian sisters, Alice and Elisabeth, from a wealthy Jewish banking family, the Cahen d’Anvers. Renoir received 1,500 francs for the work, an amount he viewed as “pretty stingy,” he wrote to a friend, adding: “I really give up with the Jews.” Ostler steps back in time to capture in detail the complex history of the Cahen d’Anvers family, its lavish adventures—especially those of Louise Cahen d’Anvers, the girls’ mother—and its place in a nation that was not always welcoming to Jews. In the 1880s, an “obsessive scrutiny of the Jewish population [including the Rothschild family] is becoming a preoccupation in Paris,” Ostler writes. Irène, another sister who was painted by Renoir, in Portrait of Irène Cahen d’Anvers (1880), married a wealthy Jewish man in 1892—amid talk of a Jewish cabal controlling the French economy. In 1894, the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of spying for Germany. As Marcel Proust wrote, “the Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder.” The painting’s younger sister, Elisabeth, converted to Catholicism, and in 1896, she married a Catholic count, Jean de Forceville. In 1897, Louise and Alice met the swashbuckling officer Charles Townsend, whom Alice would marry two years later. In 1898, Emile Zola’s famous “J’Accuse!” letter hit the stands, eventually contributing to a Dreyfus acquittal. Tired of Pink and Blue, the family sold it in 1909. Townsend survived the Great War, but another, deadlier war would follow, of course. During it, on March 27, 1944, Elisabeth was sent to Auschwitz. She died there.

A single painting foreshadows a tragic, expansive account of antisemitism and war.