Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s iconic 1881 painting, "Pink and Blue," captures a moment of serene innocence with two young girls, Elisabeth and Alice Cahen d’Anvers, holding hands. However, the nearly 150-year-old artwork offers no hint of the tumultuous and tragic lives that awaited the sisters. A new book, "The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal" by Catherine Ostler, unearths the dramatic trajectory of their existence from Belle Époque Paris to the brink of World War II and beyond.
Born into immense wealth, Elisabeth and Alice were the youngest daughters of Louis and Louise Cahen d’Anvers, prominent bankers in Paris. Their mother, Louise, was a noted society beauty and hosted a salon frequented by artists and writers, engaging in a long affair with art patron Charles Ephrussi. It was Ephrussi who suggested Renoir, then an emerging Impressionist, paint the Cahen d’Anvers children. Renoir first depicted their older sister, Irène, in 1880, followed by Elisabeth and Alice the next year. While praised by many, "Pink and Blue" reportedly did not meet with the approval of Louis Cahen d’Anvers, leading to a mystery surrounding his dissatisfaction and his delay in paying the artist.
Ostler's research, drawing on gossip, contemporary writings, family recollections, and extensive archival work, reconstructs the sisters' lives in the decades following the portrait's creation. The Cahen d’Anvers family, alongside other affluent Jewish families like the Rothschilds and Ephrussis, were part of Parisian high society. However, this glittering era was shadowed by political instability and rising antisemitism in the French Third Republic, exacerbated by the 1894 treason trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The affair deeply divided France and impacted the social standing of Jewish citizens.
In response to societal pressures and personal choices, Elisabeth converted to Catholicism in 1895, partly influenced by her affection for Comte Jean de Forceville, a Catholic aristocrat whom she later married. Alice, meanwhile, met British Army officer Charles Townshend in Egypt in 1897. They married in a Church of England ceremony in 1898. Townshend later had a notable, though ultimately unsuccessful, military career, including the surrender of the British garrison at Kut in 1916.
As World War II loomed and the German occupation of France began, the sisters faced vastly different fates. Alice, then 64, managed to flee France with her grandchildren and lady's maid, narrowly escaping the advancing Nazis and eventually reaching Britain. Her daughter, Audrey, remained in France to join the Resistance.
Elisabeth, who had suffered personal losses, including during World War I, and was increasingly debilitated by rheumatoid arthritis, remained in a cottage in western France. Despite considering herself a French Catholic, she was betrayed to the Gestapo by a village mayor reportedly harboring resentment towards her family. She was arrested in early 1944, sent to the Drancy transit camp, and deported to Auschwitz in March of that year, where she perished at the age of 69.
The painting "Pink and Blue" itself had a fortunate escape from wartime Europe. In 1939, it was part of a French art tour in the Americas. After the tour, the dual portrait, which had been sold by the Cahen d’Anvers family in 1909, was stored in New York and later acquired in 1951 by Brazilian collector Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand Bandeira de Melo. Today, the poignant image of Elisabeth and Alice resides in the São Paulo Museum of Art, a relic of a bygone era. ![Book cover for "The Renoir Girls" featuring two young girls from Renoir's painting "The Pink and the Blue" on either side of the Eiffel Tower.]( "Book cover for "The Renoir Girls" featuring two young girls from Renoir's painting "The Pink and the Blue" on either side of the Eiffel Tower.")