About this episode

Catherine Ostler discusses her book 'The Renoir Girls', exploring the tragic fate of the subjects of Renoir's portrait against the backdrop of late 19th century France and the Holocaust.

It is impossible to tell from Renoir’s celebrated portrait of two delightful, pampered-looking girls that its subject — and their family at large — are destined for a horrible end; one of the girls would be murdered in Auschwitz, by then an elderly lady. The world of Catherine Ostler's The Renoir Girls is that of the super-rich Jewish bankers of late C19th France, great patrons of the arts and apparently assimilated, whose position was shown by the Dreyfus Affair to be fragile and reached its appalling conclusions under Vichy. It is the world of Proust and, of course, The Hare With Amber Eyes, whose characters were cousins of the Renoir girls and whose author (Edmund de Waal) soundly endorses this book on its cover. The book is excellent and has received some terrific reviews, which word-of-mouth responses so far have unequivocally supported. Interviewed by John de Falbe Edited by Magnus Rena

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