THE GIRL IN BLUE

A child’s portrait captures a world.

Paris-based journalist Carvajal uses La Petite Irène, a portrait painted by Renoir of 8-year-old Irène Cahen d’Anvers (1872-1963), to reveal the history of Jews in France from the Belle Epoque through the Nazi occupation and its aftermath. The Cahen d’Anvers family inhabited a rarefied high society; bankers with immense wealth, their palatial residences boasted impressive art collections. Like others of their class, they commissioned portraits of family members: Renoir’s of Irène, and another of her sisters Elizabeth and Alice, were often lent to gallery and museum exhibitions, where they were widely admired. Carvajal juxtaposes a chronicle of Irène’s life—her troubled marriage in 1891 to Moïse de Camodo; of a Jewish banking dynasty; their divorce in 1902; her conversion to Catholicism; and a second marriage that also ended, in 1918. Marital troubles, though, were minor compared with the upheaval caused by the rise of Nazism and the systematic looting and “Aryanization” of Jewish property and assets, including Renoir’s painting. Although Irène’s son-in-law tried to protect the portrait by sending it for safekeeping to the Louvre, the museum cooperated with Hitler’s “looting agency,” packing the portrait into one of the hundreds of crates they plundered. Meanwhile, as family members were arrested and sent to camps, 68-year-old Irène hid, living in the shadows “as a well-dressed older woman in a wealthy neighborhood that was not targeted with the same aggressiveness as ones with immigrant populations.” After the war, she resurfaced and, amazingly, so did the portrait, returned to France and to her. Renoir’s delicate, tender rendering of an innocent child bore witness to death and destruction, the annihilation of Jewish lives, and the virulent rage of antisemitism.

A richly detailed family saga.