🎧 Who Are Renoir’s Mystery Girls? With Catherine Ostler
Podcasts (audio only)
•
39m
Could one of Renoir’s most iconic paintings conceal one of the most astonishing true stories of scandal and tragedy in Golden Age Paris?
In 1881, Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted two young sisters from a Jewish banking dynasty at their home in Paris’s grand 8th arrondissement. Pink and Blue, a portrait of Elisabeth and Alice Cahen d’Anvers, is one of Renoir’s most celebrated works. But behind the evoked glamour of the Belle Époque, a darker story was unfurling.
In this episode, journalist and author James McAuley speaks with writer Catherine Ostler about how Renoir’s Impressionist masterpiece hides both a family secret and the tensions of an era poised for rupture.
Drawing from her new book The Renoir Girls, Ostler’s new archival research unveils an intimate story of family betrayal which came to embody both the glamour and the vulnerability of Jewish life in Europe, as rising antisemitism and political upheaval reshaped the continent.
Catherine Ostler is a writer and historian. She is the author of The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal.
James McAuley is a journalist and author of The House of Fragile Things, and a Global Opinions contributing columnist for The Washington Post.
Up Next in Podcasts (audio only)
-
🎧 Stalin vs Trotsky: The Assassinatio...
On August 20, 1940, in a quiet study in Mexico, one of the 20th century’s most consequential political exiles was assassinated with an ice pick. The killing of Leon Trotsky marked the culmination of a relentless campaign orchestrated by Joseph Stalin, stretching across continents and years of pur...
-
🎧 Can Discomfort Be the Key to a Bett...
Dr Radha Modgil is joined by endurance athlete, investor and author Ken Rideout for an inspiring Intelligence Squared conversation on what it really takes to transform your life. Drawing on the ideas in his book Everything You Want Is On The Other Side of Hard, Rideout argues that growth, confide...
-
🎧 How and Why did Sexual Reproduction...
Before sex evolved on our planet, two billion years ago, all reproduction happened asexually. So why and how did sexual reproduction evolve?
Dr Lixing Sun is Distinguished Research Professor in behavior and evolution at Central Washington University. In a new book, On the Origin of Sex, he explo...
