Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal

The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal

Ostler, Catherine

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralHolocaust

Publisher Price: $35.00

ISBN10: 1668232480
ISBN13: 9781668232484
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: Jul 14 2026
Pages: 432
Weight: 1.35
Height: 1.50 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2026

Beguiling, troubling and ultimately heartbreaking... Ostler employs her research skills like an X-ray technician, peeking beneath the painting's shimmering surface to reveal secrets and betrayals at the heart of both a single Jewish family and French society. --The New York Times Book Review

Immensely rewarding...Ostler transforms history's grand sweep into intimate profile. --The Washington Post

Three sisters, the daughters of a prominent French Jewish family, all painted as children by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In the turbulent years from the Belle Epoque to World War II, one would marry an English aristocrat and escape; one would become a collaborator with the Nazis; one would die in Auschwitz. This is the remarkable hidden history of the lives behind Renoir's beguiling portraits.

Paris, 1881. The artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir knocks on the door of a wealthy Jewish family's home in the 8th arrondissement, the grandest quarter of Paris. He has arrived to paint the portrait of the family's two youngest daughters. The parents, the Cahen d'Anvers, 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 mother's lovers, a heroic British General; from the King of Spain to Dreyfus, Proust, and Maupassant--this is a story about one of the world's 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.

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