{"id":930036,"date":"2026-07-12T14:47:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T14:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/930036\/"},"modified":"2026-07-12T14:47:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T14:47:13","slug":"how-the-lives-of-renoirs-most-adorable-subjects-turned-tragic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/930036\/","title":{"rendered":"How the lives of Renoir’s most adorable subjects turned tragic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two adorable little girls dressed in frilly white \u2014 the elder wearing a blue sash, the younger sporting a pink one \u2014 are captured by the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir<\/a> in a moment of innocence nearly 150 years ago.<\/p>\n

In the 1881 Impressionist masterpiece \u201cPink and Blue,\u201d familiar from innumerable postcards, jigsaw puzzles, and art prints, the two cherubic figures are holding hands, their hair tied back by silk ribbons, their eyes looking out at the world with gentle trust.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is no hint that Elisabeth, the blonde, then 6, and Alice, the brunette, 4, will be carried forward by time into turmoil, hardship, and unimagined brutality.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pierre-Auguste Renoir\u2019s \u201cPink and Blue\u201d (1881) captured Alice (left) and Elisabeth Cahen d\u2019Anvers in their ritzy home on Avenue Montaigne. Corbis via Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u00a0As Catherine Ostler recounts in her fascinating new book, \u201cThe Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal<\/a>,\u201d the pair began life as the cherished youngest daughters of Louis and Louise Cahen d\u2019Anvers, a wealthy couple who lived on the fashionable Avenue Montaigne in Belle \u00c9poque Paris.<\/p>\n

It was a brilliant era of galloping scientific and technological progress, and a remarkable flowering in the fine arts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The girls\u2019 mother, Louise, was a well-known society beauty who dressed in haute couture, hosted a salon for artists and writers, and conducted a long affair with art patron Charles Ephrussi, believed to be an inspiration for Charles Swann in Marcel Proust\u2019s \u201cIn Search of Lost Time<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ephrussi persuaded Louise to have her children\u2019s portraits done by Renoir, then an up-and-comer in the Impressionist movement, which was radically overturning the rigid rules of academic painting. Renoir first visited the Cahen d\u2019Anvers townhouse in 1880 to paint his older sister, Ir\u00e8ne. In this striking picture \u2014 known now as \u201cLittle Ir\u00e8ne\u201d \u2014 the girl\u2019s cascade of red-gold hair, doll-like features, and creamy skin are set off vibrantly against a green background of tangled leaves. The next year, the artist painted the two younger daughters.<\/p>\n

The artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was the portraitist of choice of Paris\u2019s Belle \u00c9poque era. AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

For some reason, this second painting, although praised lavishly by others, did not meet the approval of the girls\u2019 father, Louis Cahen d\u2019Anvers, who dragged his feet in paying Renoir. Did the image of little Alice, in particular, make him unhappy? Did he suspect she was not his daughter, but Ephrussi\u2019s?\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is the first mystery in a story full of them. Relying on gossip, supposition, contemporary writing, and family memories \u2014 plus a deep dive into French and English archives \u2014 Ostler pieces together what happened to the two girls in the decades after the portrait was completed. A final, thunder-clap revelation is the capstone of her absorbing account.<\/p>\n

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Ostler\u2019s interest was first sparked 15 years ago, when she ran across a reference to the Renoir double portrait in Edmund De Waal\u2019s \u201cThe Hare with Amber Eyes,\u201d a bestselling memoir about his family, the Ephrussis. De Waal also mentioned that Elisabeth died after being deported to Auschwitz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis hooked my heart, maybe because at the time I had two daughters just about the same age as Elisabeth and Alice,\u201d Ostler told The Post. \u201cWhen I embarked on this work, I only had a beginning \u2014 the painting \u2014 and an ending \u2014 the older girl\u2019s murder. The mystery would be what came between.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ostler devotes the first half of the book to describing the glittering world in which the girls came of age. The Cahen d\u2019Anvers were bankers, and alongside other rich Jewish families like the Rothschilds and the Ephrussis, they had joined the Parisian elite, called in colloquial French le gratin after the crispy, tasty top of baked macaroni or potato dishes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Louise Cahen d\u2019Anvers charmed Paris\u2019s nobility, even as the city was rocked by rampant antisemitism. Public Domain<\/p>\n

While Paris society at the close of the 19th century thrummed with beauty and sophistication, French politics of the time were fractious. The Third Republic, newly established in the wake of the nation\u2019s humiliating 1871 defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, struggled for legitimacy. \u201cThere were those that wanted a republic,\u201d Ostler told The Post. \u201cAnd others who wanted a monarchy, but even the monarchists were split between various factions.\u201d Instability fueled xenophobia and antisemitism.<\/p>\n

Jews had been granted full rights as citizens after the French Revolution, and families such as the Cahen d\u2019Anvers had left places elsewhere in Europe to come to Paris. Most felt themselves quickly assimilated.\u00a0 But suspicion and resentment against Jews flared once a French army captain of Jewish descent, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted on treason charges in 1894. Although fresh evidence exonerating Dreyfus rapidly came to light, France split into two fiercely opposed camps, Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Proust later described how Jews in high society lost status as a result of the Dreyfus affair, and conversions to Christianity, once rare, increased sharply. Elisabeth Cahen d\u2019Anvers chose to become a Catholic in 1895. The tender care she received from nuns after a riding accident landed her in the hospital may have prompted this. But she had also fallen in love with Comte Jean de Forceville, a Catholic aristocrat from Picardy, whom she later married.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Major-General Charles Townshend (bottom center) won over his troops with his banjo playing. Wikipedia<\/p>\n

Alice was taken by her mother to Egypt for the winter season in 1897, where she met one of the British Army\u2019s rising stars, Charles Townshend. Most likely, Townshend first had an affair with Louise before turning his attentions to her daughter, 21. Townshend and Alice were wed a year later in a Church of England ceremony at the family chateau outside Paris. (He enjoyed a fine army career until April 1916, when he oversaw the humiliating surrender of the British garrison at Kut, south of Bagdad, to the Ottoman Army.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Once she was married, Alice lived mostly in England, but was in France as the Germans advanced in May 1940, and resolved to spirit her grandson and granddaughter out of the country. Alice\u2019s daughter Audrey, married to a Belgian count, chose to stay behind and work for the Resistance. Alice, then 64, found herself cowering in a ditch for two nights with the two children and her lady\u2019s maid as the Luftwaffe flew overhead. The group reached Bordeaux just ahead of the Nazis and boarded an overcrowded freighter bound for Britain. (Alice\u2019s grandson, Arnaud de Borchgrave, was the longtime Newsweek journalist who died in 2015.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Elisabeth, who had divorced two husbands and lost another love in World War I, retreated from Paris after the German occupation.\u00a0Crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, she could barely walk \u2014 a Gentile couple cared for her in a cottage in the village of Juign\u00e9-sur-Sarthe, 150 miles west of Paris. Elisabeth considered herself a French Catholic and had no inkling that the rabidly antisemitic village mayor \u2014 likely channeling a grievance against the Cahen d\u2019Anvers family from decades before \u2014 would inform the Gestapo of her whereabouts. She was arrested and sent to Drancy, a collection point for Jews outside Paris, in winter 1944. Aged 69, infirm Elisabeth, the little girl who once wore the blue sash, was transported east to her death in March.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Renoir Girls\u201d is available now.<\/p>\n

And what of Renoir\u2019s \u201cPink and Blue\u201d? Most fortuitously, in summer 1939, the painting was included in a collection of French art organized by a Louvre curator and sent on a tour of the Americas. <\/p>\n

At the tour\u2019s end, the dual portrait \u2014 which had been sold in 1909 by the Cahen d\u2019Anvers family to the Bernheims, gallerists in Paris \u2014 was stashed in a fine-art storage facility on New York\u2019s Second Avenue and 61st Street, until, in 1951, it was sold to the Brazilian plutocrat Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand Bandeira de Melo.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today, Elisabeth and Alice\u2019s portrait hangs in the S\u00e3o Paulo Museum of Art \u2014 a poignant relic of opulent, brittle Belle \u00c9poque Paris.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two adorable little girls dressed in frilly white \u2014 the elder wearing a blue sash, the younger sporting…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":930037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[32],"tags":[1037,648,1032,1022,1033,171,472,1165,32681,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-930036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-books","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-history","tag-lifestyle","tag-postscript","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116907556545286074","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=930036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/930037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=930036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=930036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=930036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}