The Renoir Girls - by Catherine Ostler (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Inspired by the true story behind one of impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir's most famous paintings, this is the 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.

About the Author

Catherine Ostler is an author and journalist who has been editor-in-chief of Tatler, the Evening Standard (London), and editor of The Times (London) Weekend Edition. She has also written for a wide range of publications, including Vogue, Daily Mail (London), and Newsweek. She read English at Oxford University, specializing in literature, and is the author of The Dutchess Countess: The Woman Who Scandalized Eighteenth-Century London.