The Renoir Girls

(Hardback)

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1881. The artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir knocks on the door of a wealthy Jewish familys home in the 8th arrondissement, the grandest quarter of Paris.He has arrived to paint the portrait of the young daughters. The parents, the Cahen dAnvers, 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 mothers lovers, a heroic British General; from the King of Spain to Dreyfus, Proust and Maupassant this is a story about one of the worlds 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.

Author Bio

Catherine Ostler is an author and journalist who has been editor-in-chief ofTatler, theEvening Standard(London), and editor ofThe Times(London) Weekend Edition. She has also written for a wide range of publications, includingVogue,Daily Mail(London), andNewsweek. She read English at Oxford University,specializing in literature.