Catherine Ostler on The Renoir Girls: Hidden Lives Behind One of Renoir’s Most Famous Paintings

About this episode

Many of us have stood in a museum before a beautiful portrait of a child and wondered: Who was she? Who did she grow up to be? In The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal, journalist and author Catherine Ostler traces the astonishing lives of Irène, Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers—three sisters born into a wealthy Jewish banking family in Belle Époque Paris and immortalized as children by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The paintings capture the girls in a world of beauty, privilege and apparent security. But beyond their gilded childhood, their lives would take dramatically different paths through love and loss, marriage and scandal, antisemitism and two world wars. Their…