The Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) is suspended successful the aerial supra the postulation and the trees of the Avenida Paulista. By immoderate architectural wizardry of factual and solid the pictures wrong basal to attention, arsenic if they, too, are suspended successful clip and space—a postulation that faces successful 1 direction, successful orderly fashion, similar the Terracotta Army. We are precise acold from the jostling walls of the Salon of 1881 successful Paris, wherever 1 of these pictures archetypal hung—necks craning, silk skirts bustling, and each the artworks truthful tightly packed that they stared backmost astatine the assemblage similar faces successful a teeming crowd.
But present it is successful twenty-first-century São Paulo, successful the bosom of the museum: a coating of 2 girls, successful the “glass easel” designed by the museum’s architect, Lina Bo Bardi. You tin locomotion close astir it connected the achromatic rubber level and spot it from each angle; Pink and Blue, the Misses Cahen d’Anvers, the representation of Alice (pink) and Elisabeth (blue), is the astir beloved representation successful this modernist museum. It’s casual to spot why: each the quality and defiance of puerility and each the wonderment of Belle Époque Paris is successful this painting, successful those 2 saccharine faces, successful its shimmer-ing colors, its artful light, its affluent backdrop. The artist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was past arsenic avant-garde arsenic MASP’s plan is today.
Nearby are immoderate different paintings by Renoir: Girl with Flowers (1888); different child, Marthe Bérard (1879), much somber successful blue-sashed black; and the Comtesse de Pourtalès (1877), successful a daring evening gown. But nary are rather truthful affecting arsenic this snapshot of a infinitesimal successful child-hood, erstwhile 2 young daughters of a caller Parisian banking household were reluctantly posing successful their lace dresses and silk sashes.
But successful immoderate ways, this gilded life, this civilized Paris—even, successful fact, the Cahen d’Anvers family—was a lie.
It whitethorn beryllium that immoderate works of past originate from an overpowering affectional propulsion mixed with the tone of inquiry. As the creation historiographer Colin Bailey has written of Renoir: “No different creator of the nineteenth period bequeathed specified an enduring and endearing representation of elegance, comfortableness and prosperity—one that, arsenic Proust noted, was not to beryllium recovered successful the canvases of immoderate of the much fashionable art-ists of the Third Republic.”
In that lush interior (he had decorated truthful galore of their interiors), the frothy dresses (he had drawn truthful overmuch of their fabric), the sheer richness and exquisite prettiness, Renoir takes america by the manus and leads america into that gilded life, erstwhile flourishing, flamboyant Paris was the bosom of the civilized world.
But successful immoderate ways, this gilded life, this civilized Paris—even, successful fact, the Cahen d’Anvers family—was a lie.
All the creator glories of Impressionism—its inventiveness, its inno-vative mode with light, its joy—concealed profound societal ambivalence, successful this lawsuit the ambivalence of creator to client, but yet of France to newcomer, of 1 radical to another. Renoir painted the Cahen d’Anvers sisters, including their elder sister, Irène, erstwhile France was coming retired of a nationalist crisis, turning itself from empire to re-public; deciding what and however to be. The state was nervous, divided, traumatized.
When they were painted, they were drenched successful each the committedness and privilege of a pampered girlhood.
My caller book, The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal, came astir due to the fact that of a information that the writer was incapable to grasp: that 1 of these girls painted by Renoir successful afloat Belle Époque loveliness was, six decades later, murdered successful Auschwitz, having been arrested and sent determination by her chap French citizens.
Not conscionable Elisabeth, but Irène’s girl and grandchildren, different friends and relations, and thousands more.
In 1880, a twelvemonth earlier coating Alice and Elisabeth, Renoir, past a modish, ambitious Impressionist, not yet forty, had painted Irène Cahen d’Anvers successful the plot of a municipality palace connected Avenue Montaigne, steps from the Champs-Élysées. The eight-year-old miss sat obediently for her portrait, her hairsbreadth dappled successful airy against foliage.
Renoir’s paintings of these children evoke a Paris of pleasure; that rapturous epoch of opulence, expansion, and burgeoning empire, with its religion successful reason, progress, and the Enlightenment, an property successful which the Cahen d’Anvers Jewish banking dynasty, who co-founded Paribas, are hosts, collectors, and patrons of the arts. Their uncle Albert Cahen d’Anvers (his Renoir representation is successful the Getty, Los Angeles) is simply a composer. Marcel Proust, Paul Bourget, and Guy de Maupassant, alongside royalty, diplomats, and politicians, are guests astatine the salon of their spell-binding mother, calved Louise Morpurgo successful Trieste. Paris is successful its astir originative period. For the Cahen d’Anvers, patronage and assimilation into France’s Third Republic spell manus successful hand.
When they were painted, they were drenched successful each the committedness and privilege of a pampered girlhood. They are celebrated arsenic immoderate of Renoir’s astir tender and beauteous images of children. It is intolerable to imagine, looking astatine their portraits, that the aboriginal of these girls volition beryllium thing different than arsenic gilded arsenic their infancy.
But the notation of Alice and Elisabeth successful Edmund de Waal’s mesmerizing publication The Hare with Amber Eyes, which lived with maine mode beyond the past page, (along with his aboriginal enactment Letters to Camondo), led maine to recognize that thing could person been further from the truth. Some of the large patrons of Parisian art, specified arsenic the Cahen d’Anvers household and their descendants, would beryllium brutally fto down by the federation they enriched with their possessions and their patronage, due to the fact that of their Jewish heritage.
If each play of creativity has strife earlier it, past it was the shadiness of the Franco-Prussian War, which insulted Paris’s dignity, humiliated and starved and turned its radical against 1 another, that was the forerunner of the aureate glow that followed. But the divisions con-tinued, peculiarly erstwhile Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish serviceman successful the French Army, was falsely accused of being a spy successful 1894. The lawsuit became a battleground for the psyche of France. To some, helium was blameworthy not by enactment but by ancestry. Even erstwhile helium was exonerated, France was near fractured. Beneath each the splendor, the couture, the balls, and the opera lurked an undercurrent of hatred, 1 that would fester and erupt successful ways some insidious and catastrophic.
But though few, then, could perchance person foreseen the cataclysm of the twentieth-century wars, the hatred was already determination successful the anti-semitism of aged France, successful the divisions implicit Dreyfus. The First World War brought down the curtain connected a full satellite and mode of life, but agreed France: each disposable antheral successful the wider Cahen d’Anvers household (children, grandchildren, in-laws) fought connected onshore oregon successful the air; immoderate were wounded, 1 died; Louise and her daughters became nurses. Yet somehow, 2 decades later, the viciously antisemitic Vichy authorities planted itself successful power; a shocking betrayal by France of immoderate of its astir loyal and generous supporters, successful a dehumanizing toxic swamp of suspicion, judgment, envy.
My publication traces the communicative of these 3 sisters painted by Renoir to spot however the effects of Dreyfus, of ever-rising antisemitism and 2 satellite wars, governed their lives. Unlike their brothers, done matrimony they had the accidental to conceal their Jewish heritage, by changing the surname that their mother’s romanticist entanglements had already seared with rumor. Though Renoir has formed a benignant of immortality onto the young Cahen d’Anvers girls, the remainder of their lives are retired of focus. To archer their communicative we indispensable archetypal spell backmost to the Judengasse successful Bonn and the escaped larboard of Trieste, wherever their parents, Louis Cahen d’Anvers and Louise Morpurgo, were raised, earlier they, similar truthful galore others, specified arsenic their chap Jewish banking dynasty the Ephrussi, converge successful Paris earlier the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and the instauration of the Third Republic. Throughout the Belle Époque, Louis and Louise found themselves among the Parisian artists, writers, and aristocracy, earlier they instrumentality successful the farther reaches of the satellite successful Africa and India and past the satellite wars, which saw not conscionable acold fearfulness but besides unthinkable bravery.
In 1881, 2 young girls from a affluent Parisian household of the Faubourg were taken downstairs by their nanny, successful achromatic dresses and bluish and pinkish sashes, to beryllium painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In that transient moment, they knew small of their past, and thing of their future.
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From The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal. Used with the support of the publisher, Atria Books. Copyright © 2026 by Catherine Ostler
English (US) ·