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A Hidden History of Art, War, and Betrayal
by Catherine Ostler
The true story of one of impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir's most famous paintings, and an astonishing exploration of the rise and fall of a prominent French Jewish family from the Belle epoque to World War II.
Paris, 1881. The artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir knocks on the door of a wealthy Jewish family's home in the 8th arrondissement, the grandest quarter of Paris. He has arrived to paint the portrait of the family's two youngest daughters. The parents, the Cahen d'Anvers, are bankers, collectors, philanthropists, and pillars of Parisian society. They go to balls, breed racehorses, and ride in the Bois de Boulogne with their aristocratic friends. But for the Jewish community, the undercurrents of Parisian sentiment are already moving in a sinister direction. The story of the Renoir girls will end in the duplicity and the horror of the Second World War.
With an extraordinary cast of characters, from the girls themselves, their mother's lovers, a heroic British General; from the King of Spain to Dreyfus, Proust, and Maupassant—this is a story about one of the world's most famous pictures, The Pink and the Blue. But really it is a story about Paris—one that prefers to be hidden. With access to never-before-seen letters, diaries, and personal recollections—it is a tale of privilege, beauty, and betrayal almost lost in the shimmering memory of a vanished world.
"Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this engrossing book takes you straight to the heart of Belle Époque France, a world of grace, wit, and elegance. No one could know, as they conducted their love affairs and enjoyed their waltzes, how close they were dancing to the seething pits of murderous racial hatred." —Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny
"An exquisite portrait of splendour, sacrifice, and suffering. What begins with a single Renoir painting of two young girls unfolds into an elegant, poignant sweep of 20th-century European history. Ostler's masterful prose and groundbreaking research create a book with the richness of a novel and the authority of deep scholarship." —Natalie Livingstone, author of The Women of Rothschild: The Untold Story of the World's Most Famous Dynasty
This information about The Renoir Girls was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Catherine Ostler is an author and journalist who has been Editor-in-Chief of Tatler, the English Standard (London), the Evening Standard magazine (London), and Editor of The Times (London) Weekend. She has also written for a wide range of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph (London), the Financial Times, and Vogue. She studied English at Oxford University. Her first book was the critically acclaimed The Duchess Countess: The Woman Who Scandalized Eighteenth-Century London.
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