The Jewish Renoir girls who were betrayed by France

The 1881 portrait of two little girls rendered in pink and blue silk by Pierre-Auguste Renoir is, at face value, a society portrait of the daughters of French aristocracy. But the story behind the painting – and what became of the Jewish girls it depicts – is much darker.

Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers, the subjects of the Impressionist painter’s famous portrait Pink and Blue and the younger daughters of a French banking dynasty, were immortalised as youthful members of the “haute Juiverie”: glamorous, upper-class Jews of Europe at the height of the Belle Époque. Their older sister Irène was also the subject of a famous Renoir painting several years earlier, depicted with a ribbon in her flowing red hair against a lush green backdrop.

Nothing in the portraits of the young sisters gives any indication that, 60 years later, Alice would be hiding from German bombers in a ditch in Normandy and Elisabeth, the blonde child with a blue sash in Pink and Blue, would be boarding a one-way train to Auschwitz.

"I could not get round the idea that this could be your childhood, and that could be the ending,” said Catherine Ostler, author of the new book The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal. “In a sense, this is a book that started with a beginning and an end, and I wanted to fill in the middle.”

'The Renoir Girls' by Catherine Ostler. (Photo: Simon & Schuester)[Missing Credit]

The Renoir Girls traces the path of the three Cahen d’Anvers sisters from their shimmering days in Belle Époque Paris – yachting on the Côte d’Azur, trips to the opera, salons, summer retreats, and dancing the night away at opulent balls – to their little-known struggle to survive in Nazi-occupied France.

Ostler, former editor of Tatler magazine, first heard of the three Jewish sisters from Edmund de Waal’s memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, which explores the once gilded lives of de Waal’s own Parisian Jewish banking family during the 19th and 20th centuries. His relative Charles Ephrussi, a Jewish art patron who had an affair with matriarch Louise Cahen d’Anvers - and who was rumoured to be the actual father of Alice – persuaded Louise to have her daughters painted by Renoir.

“Impressionism rises up after the Franco-Prussian War, and there's a whole new way of looking at art. There’s a lot of stuff to buy and a lot of stuff to commission and a market for it and the result is an incredibly creative period,” says Ostler, adding that Louise was an “extraordinary” art collector herself with “a hold over all the French writers and artists of the day.”

One line in de Waal’s book came as a punch to the stomach: Elisabeth was murdered at Auschwitz.

“I found it intensely moving," Ostler said. “Sometimes art can be so beautiful and yet the stories attached to it can be so horrific. The contrast is so acute that I find that very emotionally affecting.”

Catherine Ostler. (Photo: JP Masclet)[Missing Credit]

Despite the Cahen d’Anvers family’s abiding love for France, their generous artistic patronage and sacrifices during the First World War – the sons fought for France, the women were nurses, with Alice winning the Croix de guerre for bravery at the front – they were of course not spared the growing antisemitism of France that culminated in the Vichy regime. As their family friend Marcel Proust wrote at the time, the “social kaleidoscope was in the act of turning… the Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder.”

Elisabeth, in what may have been a bid for self-preservation, converted to Catholicism in 1895 and remained a practising Catholic for the rest of her life. In 1944 at the age of 70, just months from the Allied liberation of Paris, she was betrayed by a local mayor and Vichy collaborator “who insisted on reminding everybody that she was actually Jewish, even though she converted to Catholicism before she was 20 and had been married twice, both times to Catholic men,” Ostler says.

“She saw herself as a Frenchwoman, and a Catholic Frenchwoman, but she was ultimately betrayed in this terrible, slow-motion story of complicity and cruelty in the Vichy regime, where people don't question their own actions or their own attitudes.”

The three sisters on the steps of the château at Chaps-sur-Marne - Courtesy of Lady Bayliss[Missing Credit]

France's attitude to its Jews in this the era is illustrated by the Nazis’ seizure of the Cahen d’Anvers’ Paris townhouse which they used as a place to hold and torture Jews awaiting deportation.

“Antisemitism is one of those things that I've always been aware of, but it is a shapeshifter,” said Ostler, who is not Jewish herself. “It's this monstrosity, and I partly feel there is an enormous amount of ignorance about it. It overlaps with so many conspiracy theories and the darkest urges of human nature.”

She hopes The Renoir Girls will be received by British Jews as a book of support, a reminder of the immense contributions Jews have made to their societies over the past centuries.

"The Jewish community is incredibly important to this country,” Ostler said. “It's written out of respect to their strengths and creativity and generosity and the whole beauty of the culture that Jewish community can create and encourage.”

The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War and Betrayal by Catherine Ostler is published by Simon & Schuster. Ostler will be in conversation with James McAuley at Hatchards Bookshop in London on 14 April

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