Intelligence Squared Who Are Renoir’s Mystery Girls? With Catherine Ostler
Apr 7, 2026
Catherine Ostler, writer and historian and author of The Renoir Girls, explores the Cahen d’Anvers sisters behind Renoir’s Pink and Blue. She traces salon life, family scandal, conversions and mobility in Belle Époque Paris. The conversation follows the paintings’ wartime journeys, differing fates of the sisters, and how art became a witness to exile, identity and loss.
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Family's Ascent From Ghetto To Belle Époque Salon
- The Cahen d'Anvers rose from Bonn ghetto roots to Parisian high society through commerce and strategic marriages.
- Catherine Ostler traces their move from sugar trading in Antwerp to a gilded Parisian salon culture that commissioned Renoir in the 1880s.
Dreyfus Affair Shattered Social Integration
- The Dreyfus Affair fractured Parisian society and exposed assimilation's fragility for elite Jewish families.
- Ostler links social ostracism and marriage prospects to rising antisemitism that reshaped the sisters' identities.
Contingency Over Inevitability In Historical Lives
- The sisters' lives show how personal choices intersected with seismic political shifts like the Franco-Prussian War and the Third Republic.
- Ostler emphasizes contingency: different decisions produced divergent fates despite shared privileged beginnings.
