The Renoir Girls

‘Remarkable and haunting . . . a revelation’ Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

‘A dazzling achievement, heartbreaking, glamourous, elegiac, revelatory and utterly gripping’ Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The World: A Family History of Humanity

‘Truly beautiful and melodic . . . a joy to read’ Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five and Story of a Murder

CHOSEN AS A BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2026 BY THE TIMES

An astonishing true story of splendour, scandal and tragedy in Golden Age Paris.

In 1881, Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted two young sisters from a Jewish banking dynasty at their home in Paris’s grand 8th arrondissement. Pink and Blue, a portrait of Elisabeth and Alice Cahen d’Anvers, captures a fleeting moment of innocence and beauty, and today it is one of Renoir’s most celebrated works. His portrait evokes the glamour of the Belle Époque: days at the races, nights at the opera, sun-soaked chateaux, brilliant salons filled with art, music and conversation. Paris at its most dazzling.

Yet beneath the glittering surface was a surging current of resentment. Renoir’s Impressionist masterpiece, radiant with light and colour, hides both a family secret and the tensions of an era poised for rupture. The same society that was illuminated by progress and culture was cast into shadow by division, prejudice and rising antisemitism. The Cahen d’Anvers, prominent patrons of this Golden Age, would come to embody both its glory and its tragedy.