The Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) is suspended in the air above the traffic and trees of Avenida Paulista. The photographs inside attract attention with some architectural wizardry of concrete and glass, as if they, too, are suspended in time and space – a collection that faces organically, like a terracotta army, in one direction. We are a long way from the bustling walls of the Salon of 1881 in Paris, where one of these pictures first hung – plunging necks, flowing silk skirts, and all the artworks packed so tightly that they stared out at the viewer like faces in a crowded crowd.
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But here it is, in twenty-first-century São Paulo, at the center of the museum: a painting of two girls in a “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, Mrs. Kahen D’AnversThe portrait of Alice (pink) and Elizabeth (blue) is one of the most beloved paintings 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 are in this painting, in those two lovely faces, in its shimmering colors, in its artful light, in its rich background. The artist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was as pioneering then as the MASP design is today.
Nearby are some other paintings by Renoir: flower girl (1888); another child, marthe berard (1879), more sombre in blue-black; and this Comtesse de Portales (1877), in a daring evening gown. But none is so affecting as this snapshot of that childhood moment, when the 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, indeed, the Cahen d’Anvers family – was a lie.
It is possible that some works of history may have arisen out of extreme emotional pull and a sense of curiosity. As art historian Colin Bailey wrote of Renoir: “No other nineteenth-century artist created such an enduring and captivating image of elegance, comfort, and opulence – which, as Proust said, was not to be found in the canvases of any of the more fashionable art-artists of the Third Republic.”
In those lush interiors (he decorated many of her interiors), the frothy fabrics (he designed much of her wardrobe), the sheer opulence and exquisite beauty, Renoir takes us by the hand and takes us back to 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, indeed, the Cahen d’Anvers family – was a lie.
All the artistic glories of Impressionism – its inventiveness, its innovative way with light, its joy – conceal a profound social ambivalence, in this example the ambivalence of one person to another, from painter to client, but ultimately to the newcomer from France. Renoir painted the Cahen d’Anvers sisters, including their older sister, Irene, at a time when France was coming out of a national crisis, reasserting itself from the Empire; Deciding what and how to become. The country was nervous, divided, in shock.
When they were painted, they were drenched in all the promises and privileges of pampered girlhood.
my new book, The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War, and BetrayalArising due to a fact the author was unable to understand: that one of these girls, painted by Renoir in full Belle Époque beauty, was, six decades later, murdered in Auschwitz, arrested and sent there by her fellow French citizens.
Not just Elizabeth, but Irene’s daughter and grandchildren, other friends and relatives, and thousands of others.
In 1880, a year before he painted Alice and Elisabeth, Renoir, then a modern, aspiring Impressionist, not yet forty, had painted Irène Cahen d’Anvers in the garden of a town palace on the Avenue Montaigne, a few steps from the Champs-Élysées. The eight-year-old girl sat obediently for her portrait, her hair shining in the light of the leaves.
Renoir’s paintings of these children create an atmosphere of joy in Paris; That euphoric era of prosperity, expansion and growing empire, with its faith in reason, progress and enlightenment, an era in which the Cahen d’Anvers Jewish banking dynasty, who co-founded Paribas, are hosts, collectors and patrons of the arts. His uncle Albert Kahn d’Anvers (his Renoir portrait is in the Getty, Los Angeles) is a musician. Royalty, diplomats and politicians, as well as Marcel Proust, Paul Bourget and Guy de Maupassant, are guests in the salon of Trieste-born Louise Morpurgo’s enchanted mother. Paris is at its most creative. For Cahen d’Anvers, patronage and assimilation went hand in hand in France’s Third Republic.
When they were painted, they were drenched in all the promises and privileges of pampered girlhood. They are celebrated as some of Renoir’s most tender and beautiful images of children. Looking at their pictures, it is impossible to imagine that the future of these girls will be anything other than as golden as their childhood.
But in Edmond de Waal’s enchanting book Alice and Elizabeth amber eyed rabbitwhich stayed with me even after the last page (along with his later work) letter to camondo), I realized that nothing could be further from the truth. Some of the great patrons of Parisian art, such as the Cahen d’Anvers family and their descendants, would, because of their Jewish heritage, be brutally ostracized by the nation they had enriched with their wealth and patronage.
If there is conflict before every period of creativity, it was the shadow of the Franco-Prussian War, which humiliated, humiliated and starved Paris and turned its people against each other, a harbinger of the golden glow that followed. But division continued, especially when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, was falsely accused of being a spy in 1894. This matter became a battlefield for the soul of France. To some, he was guilty not by action but by lineage. Even when he was acquitted, France was devastated. Beneath all the pomp, pageantry, balls and opera lurked an undercurrent of hatred that would spread and burst forth in ways both deadly and destructive.
But although few could have imagined the cataclysm of the wars of the twentieth century, hatred was already present in the anti-Semitism of old France, in the schism over Dreyfus. The First World War brought a curtain on the entire world and way of life, but France stood united: every available person in the extensive Cahen d’Anvers family (children, grandchildren, in-laws) fought on the ground or in the air; Some were injured, one died; Lewis and his daughters became nurses. Yet somehow, two decades later, the horrifically anti-Semitic Vichy regime established itself in power; In an inhumane toxic swamp of suspicion, judgment, jealousy, a shocking betrayal by France of some of its most loyal and generous supporters.
My book traces the story of these three sisters painted by Renoir, to look at how Dreyfus, ever-growing anti-Semitism and the effects of two world wars controlled their lives. Unlike his brothers, marriage allowed him to conceal his Jewish heritage by changing his surname, which was already rumored to have been spoiled by his mother’s romantic entanglements. Although Renoir has bestowed a kind of immortality on the young Cahen d’Anvers girls, the rest of their lives are out of focus. To tell his story we must first go back to the Judengasse of Bonn and the Free Port of Trieste, where his parents, Louis Cahen d’Anvers and Louis Morpurgo, were raised, before they, like many others from their fellow Jewish banking dynasty the Ephrussi, flocked to Paris before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and the establishment of the Third Republic. Throughout the Belle Époque, Louis and Louise established themselves among the artists, writers and aristocracy of Paris, before venturing into remote parts of the world such as Africa and India and then the World Wars, which witnessed not only horrors but also incredible bravery.
In 1881, two young girls from a wealthy Paris family of the Faubourg are taken down by their grandmother, in white dress and blue and pink sash, to see a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In that fleeting moment, they knew very little about their past, and nothing about their future.
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From The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War, and Betrayal. Used with permission of the publisher, Atria Books. Copyright © 2026 by Katherine Ostler
