The Renoir Girls.
Catherine Ostler.
On the 21st of April a friend and I went along to a book talk at the Royal Scots Club, organised by Toppings. I have been to several of their events over the years and always find them genuinely engaging. There is something about the format that tends to draw out the best in a book, and I almost always leave with a copy. This was the first one I had been to that leant more towards art history, which felt like good timing with where I am in this course.
Catherine Ostler's The Renoir Girls begins with a single painting. In 1881, Renoir knocked on the door of a wealthy Jewish banking family in the 8th arrondissement of Paris and painted their two youngest daughters. The result was Pink and Blue, a portrait of Elisabeth and Alice Cahen d'Anvers, all dresses and composure and the particular stillness of children who have been asked to hold still. It is one of his most celebrated works. Ostler's book asks what lay beyond the frame.
The answer, it turns out, is everything. Belle Époque glamour, the Dreyfus Affair, family secrets, the slow gathering of antisemitism across French society, and eventually the Holocaust. The Cahen d'Anvers were patrons, philanthropists, pillars of a world that would turn on them. What Ostler has done, drawing on letters, diaries, and new archival research, is trace the family across generations and continents. The kind of deep genealogical work that I find endlessly compelling. There is something about family histories that gets at the questions I keep returning to: the stories that make us who we are, the things that get carried forward without anyone quite choosing to carry them.
The world those two girls were painted into, the grand houses, the salon culture, the sense of being at the very centre of things, did not hold. The same society that commissioned the portrait and celebrated it would eventually turn with devastating force against the family it depicted. Alice, one of the sisters in the painting, died in a concentration camp. It is the kind of fact that sits very heavily once you know it. You look at her in the portrait, small and composed in her blue dress, and the distance between that moment and what came later feels almost impossible to hold in the mind at once.
What I found myself thinking about most, sitting in that room listening to Ostler talk, was how a painting can hold something and not know it is holding it. Pink and Blue looks like innocence, like wealth, like a moment caught. It does not look like what came after. And yet the painting itself survived, which is its own strange fact. It is not in Paris any more. After passing through various hands across the upheaval of the twentieth century, it now hangs in São Paulo, in Brazil, carried far from the world it was made in, far from the city and the family and the particular afternoon light of that 8th arrondissement house. There is something in that journey that Ostler is very alive to: what objects carry, what they outlast, and what gets lost anyway.
I kept thinking about what it means to look at a work of art once you know the rest of the story. Whether the image changes, or whether you just bring a different kind of attention to it.
Ostler is a compelling speaker, and the questions from the room were good. My friend and I left afterwards still talking about it, which is probably the best thing you can say about any book event.
I left with a copy, as usual. I have started reading it now, and it is every bit as detailed as the talk suggested it would be.
