Three little girls sit for a portrait in 1881, all ribbons and reflected light, painted by a rising artist named Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Sixty years later, one of those girls will be dead in Auschwitz. That is the gut-punch premise Catherine Ostler builds “The Renoir Girls” around, and it never loosens its grip.
The Cahen d’Anvers were among the most glittering Jewish banking families of Belle Époque Paris — collectors, philanthropists, fixtures of a society that welcomed their money and, when it mattered most, abandoned their safety. Ostler traces the daughters of that family across six decades and two world wars: one who married into the English aristocracy and slipped free of the coming catastrophe, one who chose collaboration and comfort under Nazi occupation, and one who was deported and murdered. Renoir’s brushstrokes freeze them all at the same untroubled age; history does not extend them the same mercy.
What makes the book work is Ostler’s refusal to let any of the sisters become a symbol. She writes with a novelist’s patience for interior life and a historian’s insistence on documentation, moving through ballrooms, occupation-era Paris, and postwar reckonings without ever losing the reader’s footing. The research is extensive — family letters, court records, Vichy-era paperwork — but it never buries the human stakes. Ostler is especially sharp on the moral compromises of assimilation, the ways a family that believed wealth and taste could buy safety learned, at ruinous cost, that it could not. The book’s structure, cutting between the three sisters’ diverging fates, builds a quiet dread that never tips into melodrama.
Since its release, “The Renoir Girls” has drawn strong notice from critics who’ve praised Ostler’s ability to turn archival research into a genuinely propulsive narrative, with several reviewers singling out her handling of the collaborator sister as the book’s most uncomfortable and necessary achievement. Commentary has also focused on how the book complicates easy narratives of victimhood and survival, showing that even within one family, history offered no uniform verdict. A handful of reviewers have wished for a tighter final third, but the consensus view treats the book as a genuinely fresh entry in Holocaust-era family history, distinguished by its art-historical hook and its refusal of sentimentality.
“The Renoir Girls” is not an easy read, and it isn’t meant to be. It’s a rigorously reported, quietly devastating account of how one portrait can outlive the world that made it — and how three sisters who shared a childhood, a family, and a painter ended up living, and dying, in entirely different centuries of history. Highly recommended for readers of narrative nonfiction who want their history unsentimental and their prose exact.
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