Who, Exactly, Were All Those Girls in Renoir’s Paintings?

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) is suspended in the air above the traffic and the trees of the Avenida Paulista. By some architectural wizardry of concrete and glass the pictures inside stand to attention, as if they, too, are suspended in time and space—a collection that faces in one direction, in orderly fashion, like the Terracotta Army. We are very far from the jostling walls of the Salon of 1881 in Paris, where one of these pictures first hung—necks craning, silk skirts bustling, and all the artworks so tightly packed that they stared back at the audience like faces in a teeming crowd.

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But here it is in twenty-first-century São Paulo, in the heart of the museum: a painting of two girls, in the “glass easel” designed by the museum’s architect, Lina Bo Bardi. You can walk right around it on the black rubber floor and see it from every angle; Pink and Blue, the Misses Cahen d’Anvers, the portrait of Alice (pink) and Elisabeth (blue), is the most beloved picture in this modernist museum. It’s easy to see why: all the beauty and defiance of childhood and all the wonder of Belle Époque Paris is in this painting, in those two sweet faces, in its shimmer-ing colors, its artful light, its rich backdrop. The artist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was then as avant-garde as MASP’s design is today.

Nearby are some other paintings by Renoir: Girl with Flowers (1888); another child, Marthe Bérard (1879), more somber in blue-sashed black; and the Comtesse de Pourtalès (1877), in a daring evening gown. But none are quite so affecting as this snapshot of a moment in child-hood, when two young daughters of a new Parisian banking family were reluctantly posing in their lace dresses and silk sashes.

But in some ways, this gilded life, this civilized Paris—even, in fact, the Cahen d’Anvers family—was a lie.

It may be that some works of history arise from an overpowering emotional pull mixed with the spirit of inquiry. As the art historian Colin Bailey has written of Renoir: “No other artist of the nineteenth century bequeathed such an enduring and endearing image of elegance, comfort and prosperity—one that, as Proust noted, was not to be found in the canvases of any of the more fashionable art-ists of the Third Republic.”

In that lush interior (he had decorated so many of their interiors), the frothy dresses (he had drawn so much of their fabric), the sheer richness and exquisite prettiness, Renoir takes us by the hand and leads us into that gilded life, when flourishing, flamboyant Paris was the heart of the civilized world.

But in some ways, this gilded life, this civilized Paris—even, in fact, the Cahen d’Anvers family—was a lie.

All the artistic glories of Impressionism—its inventiveness, its inno-vative way with light, its joy—concealed profound social ambivalence, in this instance the ambivalence of painter to client, but ultimately of France to newcomer, of one people to another. Renoir painted the Cahen d’Anvers sisters, including their elder sister, Irène, when France was coming out of a national crisis, turning itself from empire to re-public; deciding what and how to be. The country was nervous, divided, traumatized.

When they were painted, they were drenched in all the promise and privilege of a pampered girlhood.

My new book, The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal, came about because of a fact that the author was unable to grasp: that one of these girls painted by Renoir in full Belle Époque loveliness was, six decades later, murdered in Auschwitz, having been arrested and sent there by her fellow French citizens.

Not just Elisabeth, but Irène’s daughter and grandchildren, other friends and relations, and thousands more.

In 1880, a year before painting Alice and Elisabeth, Renoir, then a modish, ambitious Impressionist, not yet forty, had painted Irène Cahen d’Anvers in the garden of a town palace on Avenue Montaigne, steps from the Champs-Élysées. The eight-year-old girl sat obediently for her portrait, her hair dappled in light against foliage.

Renoir’s paintings of these children evoke a Paris of pleasure; that rapturous era of opulence, expansion, and burgeoning empire, with its faith in reason, progress, and the Enlightenment, an age in 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 portrait is in the Getty, Los Angeles) is a composer. Marcel Proust, Paul Bourget, and Guy de Maupassant, alongside royalty, diplomats, and politicians, are guests at the salon of their spell-binding mother, born Louise Morpurgo in Trieste. Paris is in its most creative period. For the Cahen d’Anvers, patronage and assimilation into France’s Third Republic go hand in hand.

When they were painted, they were drenched in all the promise and privilege of a pampered girlhood. They are celebrated as some of Renoir’s most tender and beautiful images of children. It is impossible to imagine, looking at their portraits, that the future of these girls will be anything other than as gilded as their infancy.

But the mention of Alice and Elisabeth in Edmund de Waal’s mesmerizing book The Hare with Amber Eyes, which lived with me way beyond the last page, (along with his later work Letters to Camondo), led me to realize that nothing could have been further from the truth. Some of the great patrons of Parisian art, such as the Cahen d’Anvers family and their descendants, would be brutally let down by the nation they enriched with their possessions and their patronage, because of their Jewish heritage.

If every period of creativity has strife before it, then it was the shadow of the Franco-Prussian War, which insulted Paris’s dignity, humiliated and starved and turned its people against one another, that was the forerunner of the golden glow that followed. But the divisions con-tinued, particularly when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, was falsely accused of being a spy in 1894. The case became a battleground for the soul of France. To some, he was guilty not by action but by ancestry. Even when he was exonerated, France was left fractured. Beneath all the splendor, the couture, the balls, and the opera lurked an undercurrent of hatred, one that would fester and erupt in ways both insidious and catastrophic.

But although few, then, could possibly have foreseen the cataclysm of the twentieth-century wars, the hatred was already there in the anti-semitism of old France, in the divisions over Dreyfus. The First World War brought down the curtain on a whole world and way of life, but united France: every available man in the wider Cahen d’Anvers family (children, grandchildren, in-laws) fought on land or in the air; some were wounded, one died; Louise and her daughters became nurses. Yet somehow, two decades later, the viciously antisemitic Vichy regime planted itself in power; a shocking betrayal by France of some of its most loyal and generous supporters, in a dehumanizing toxic swamp of suspicion, judgment, envy.

My book traces the story of these three sisters painted by Renoir to see how the effects of Dreyfus, of ever-rising antisemitism and two world wars, governed their lives. Unlike their brothers, through marriage they had the chance to conceal their Jewish heritage, by changing the surname that their mother’s romantic entanglements had already seared with rumor. Though Renoir has cast a kind of immortality onto the young Cahen d’Anvers girls, the rest of their lives are out of focus. To tell their story we must first go back to the Judengasse in Bonn and the free port of Trieste, where their parents, Louis Cahen d’Anvers and Louise Morpurgo, were raised, before they, like so many others, such as their fellow Jewish banking dynasty the Ephrussi, converge in Paris before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and the foundation of the Third Republic. Throughout the Belle Époque, Louis and Louise establish themselves among the Parisian artists, writers, and aristocracy, before they take in the farther reaches of the world in Africa and India and then the world wars, which saw not just cold horror but also incredible bravery.

In 1881, two young girls from a rich Parisian family of the Faubourg were taken downstairs by their nanny, in white dresses and blue and pink sashes, to be painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In that transient moment, they knew little of their past, and nothing of their future.

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