Little Irène and the Girls in Pink and Blue

The Untold Story of the Cahen d'Anvers Sisters, from Belle Époque Paris to Auschwitz

Two little girls stand hand in hand in a sunlit garden, dressed in silk, one in pink, one in blue, looking out at the world with the complete, unguarded trust that only childhood allows. Their portrait, painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1881, has been reproduced on millions of postcards, prints, and museum walls for more than a century. Almost no one who has seen it knows what happened to the real children inside the frame.

This is the story of Irène, Elisabeth, and Alice Cahen d'Anvers, daughters of one of Belle Époque Paris's wealthiest Jewish banking families, and the sixty years that separated a golden, protected childhood from one of history's darkest chapters.

Trace the family's rise from European Jewish banking dynasties to the absolute pinnacle of Parisian high society, where Louise Cahen d'Anvers hosted Marcel Proust in her salon and her lover introduced a struggling young Impressionist painter to her daughters. Follow the Dreyfus Affair's revelation of how conditional that acceptance truly was, and the three radically different paths each sister took in response: marriage within Jewish banking circles, conversion to Catholicism, marriage into British aristocracy. Then watch as none of it mattered. When the Nazi occupation came, Elisabeth's decades-old conversion offered no protection at all. She was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Alice fled to England, dodging German bombers over Normandy. Irène survived in occupied Paris, under circumstances that still raise difficult questions historians have never fully resolved.

This book doesn't just tell the story behind a beloved painting. It traces what happened to an entire world, wealth, culture, faith, and love, when confronted with a catastrophe none of it could stop.

Inside this book, you'll discover:

The family's rise from European banking dynasties to Belle Époque Parisian high society
The real story behind Renoir's Little Irène and Pink and Blue, including the payment disputes and mixed reception that greeted both paintings
How the Dreyfus Affair exposed the fragile foundations of French Jewish assimilation
The three sisters' radically different marriages, and radically different wartime fates
Elisabeth's arrest and deportation to Auschwitz, and the devastating irony of her decades-earlier conversion
The unresolved historical questions surrounding Irène's survival in occupied Paris

The paintings' own journey, looted, recovered, and now hanging in museums that few visitors realize hold this history
Written for readers of art history, Holocaust history, and anyone who has ever looked at a beautiful painting without knowing its full story, this book includes a complete timeline, glossary, key figures reference, and discussion questions for classroom or personal use.
The painting is real. The children were real. What happened to them was real. This is their story, told in full, for the first time in their own names rather than the painting's.

Read the history behind one of art's most beloved, and most quietly devastating, portraits.