The Girl in Blue

A sweeping and cinematic narrative history that follows Renoir’s La Petite Irène, tracing its theft from one of Paris’s wealthiest Jewish families during WWII and examining the legacy of the little girl who sat for the painting. In 1941, a specialized unit of German troops stormed the castle of Chambord in the Loire Valley and looted one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s most gorgeous and evocative masterworks: La Petite Irène. It was one of thousands of artworks stolen during the Occupation from 1940 to 1944. The portrait would enchant or curse nearly everyone who coveted it, but the living, breathing girl it depicted slipped into a crevice of history. This is her story.   Initially titled The Little Girl with the Blue Ribbon, Renoir captured the likeness of the young Irène Cahen d’Anvers—the daughter of one of Paris’s wealthiest Jewish families—in the summer of 1880 with luminous strokes, achieving a lasting impression of resignation in her light, blue-green eyes. In later years, the painting’s title evolved to, simply, La Petite Irène. But during that time, Irène life was anything but simple. She grew to be independent and rebellious, abandoning her religion and her wealthy, much older husband to marry an impoverished Italian count, the family’s racehorse trainer.   By breaking with her family, her religion, and the conventions of her time, Irène forever altered the course of her life. The Girl in Blue will restore Irène’s painful yet critical place in the history of Germany’s occupation of France. Her story—and the provenance of La Petite Irène—is an epic drama of stolen lives. Tracing the tragic history of Irène Cahen d’Anvers and her family—who struggled a half century after the portrait was painted to salvage their Renoir portrait from the Nazis and navigate the occupation of France—The Girl in Blue is a narrative history of religion, politics, and the choices people make to survive in the midst of war.