The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal by Catherine Ostler
The Renoir Girls, subtitled A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal, is an impeccably researched, sweeping, densely rich chronicle spanning the decadent Belle Époque, modern industrial times and WWII as experienced by the prominent and immensely wealthy Cahen d’Anvers family. Bestselling author and journalist Catherine Ostler examines the impact of the rapid rise in virulent anti-Semitism using the Franco-Prussian War as a starting point, followed by the impact of the 1881 assassination of Emperor of Russia Alexander II, the lasting divisiveness of the scandalous Dreyfus Affair and continuing through the two World Wars and the Holocaust. One of the four assassins of Alexander II was Jewish, which sparked a lasting wave of repercussions and pogroms throughout the Russian Empire, with echoes resounding across Europe.
In 1894, the Jewish French artillery officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. After writer Émile Zola published his open letter “J’Accuse,” Dreyfus was tried again in 1899, but it wasn’t until 1906 that he was fully exonerated and reinstated in the army. His case became a cause célèbre which deeply divided Parisian society between his supporters and largely anti-Semitic detractors.
This political and military scandal had a lasting negative impact on all economic strata of the French Jewish community, igniting hostility by fomenting underlying prejudice and stirring up an enormous anti-Semitic backlash.
Beautiful Paintings, Tumultuous Future
The Renoir Girls revolves around the lives of three daughters of six children of the Cahen d’Anvers family — Irène, Elizabeth and Alice — who were immortalized in two Impressionist masterpieces by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The front cover is adorned with 1881’s Pink and Blue, one of his most celebrated works, depicting wistful two-year-old Alice in a frilly white silk dress accessorized with a pink hair bow, sash and socks gazing ahead, standing next to four-year-old blond Elizabeth in a similarly fussy silk and lacy dress with blue accents. Innocence, beauty and familial riches are preserved in this vision of loveliness, now a crown jewel in the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand.
The back cover displays 1880’s La Petite Irène (Little Irene), their pensive, beautiful, auburn-haired eight-year-old older sister in profile. Renoir, then an impoverished artist and painter, was commissioned by Louis Cahen d’Anvers on the recommendation of Charles Ephrussi, owner of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, art collector, critic and clandestine lover of Louise Cahen d’Anvers. Renoir received 1500 francs for Pink and Blue, a mere fraction of the cost of a single gown owned by Louise Cahen d’Anvers, and expressed his disdain with an anti-Semitic slur. The painting was later stolen by the Nazis during WWII to become part of Hermann Göring’s personal collection, only to be traded for another work he fancied. Later restored to Irène Cahen d’Anvers, who sold it to Swiss industrialist and wartime arms manufacturer Emil Georg Bührle, whose Foundation Collection in Zürich retains it.
From Incredible Wealth to Wartime Tragedy
Family letters, notebooks and diaries document their lives during the gilded age when Paris was the hub of the fashionable world of the pampered glitterati; those elite whose lives revolved around endless rounds of shopping, luncheons, teas, lavish parties, salons and balls, horse racing, hunting parties and extensive travel. Women commonly changed clothing six times a day with the intent to dazzle at each appearance. Rare fabrics, hand-stitched and embellished with pearls and fine lace, brought the cost of a gown from the fashion designer House of Worth to $500 for a simple day dress to as much as $10,000 (the equivalent of $300,000 today) for an exceptional evening dress. Putting this in perspective, a skilled dressmaker of the time typically earned $1 to $2.50 per 10- to 12-hour day creating these frocks; an unsustainable disparity readily comparable to that of today’s typical CEO compensation vis-à-vis employee salaries.
The Renoir Girls graphically depicts the wartime and Holocaust tragedies which transformed the families of Irène, Elizabeth and Alice from lives of untold privilege to loss of money, businesses, homes, and in some cases, lives. One of these women saved the lives of her niece and nephew by smuggling them to England during the war, another died being transported to Auschwitz, and the third was later shunned by family members as being a Nazi collaborator.
Ostler has created an exceptional work of nonfiction, offering a fascinating and substantive examination of the rarefied lives of the one-percent financial elite through the history of the little-known Cahen d’Anvers family. To help readers understand the complexity of the eras and relationships across these decades of detailed history, the author includes a timeline of historical events, a “cast list” to illuminate the many subjects covered, impressive family trees and an enlightening selection of photographs. The Renoir Girls is an impressive blend of biography and history that compares favorably with the work of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman, renowned for her rigorous research and vivid, dramatic narrative storytelling, engagingly bringing tumultuous history to life.
About Catherine Ostler
Author and historian Catherine Ostler has held several top editing roles at publications including Tatler, ES Magazine at the Evening Standard, and Times Weekend. She has also been a columnist for the Evening Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek, an occasional columnist for the Financial Times, and has written for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Town & Country, among other publications. She is co-founder and Vice-Chairman of Cliveden Literary Festival and author of two books, the New York Times bestseller The Renoir Girls and The Duchess Countess.
Catherine is a graduate of Oxford University, where she read English Language and Literature. She lives in London with her husband, Albert Read, and their three children.
