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 the fate of the girl it immortalized.
“A vivid and deeply reported portrait of looted art, memory, and one family’s struggle for survival and justice during one of history’s darkest eras.” ‑Dana Canedy, New York Times bestselling author of A Journal for Jordan
In 1941, a specialized German looting unit raided the Chambord chateau in the Loire Valley of France and plundered one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s most haunting masterworks: La Petite Irène. The portrait would enchant or curse nearly everyone who coveted it, but the living, breathing girl it depicted slipped from view. This is her story.
She was Irène Cahen d’Anvers, born into Belle Époque privilege and a wealthy Jewish dynasty. Defiant by nature, she abandoned her religion and her arranged marriage, becoming a figure at once scandalous, elusive and resilient. As the Occupation gripped Paris, her family was targeted, persecuted and deported – punished for demanding the return of what had been stolen. Irène survived by hiding in plain sight, while questions lingered decades later about how and why.
Drawing on newly uncovered documents, newspaper accounts, and archival records, Doreen Carvajal reconstructs the intertwined journeys of a woman and a painting that was seized by the Nazis, traded through a shadowy art market, and pursued by a powerful collector. Their paths converge in a story of beauty and betrayal – the painting a silent witness to what history tried to erase.
