Feels like watching the unfolding of a horror film, albeit a very pretty one ... Proves immensely rewarding ... Ostler transforms history’s grand sweep into intimate profile. She has compiled a mountain of research among archives and interviews. You get the sense Ostler could walk into a party between the years 1871 and 1939 and tell you not only who’s who, but who’s sleeping with whom.
In The Renoir Girls, Ostler employs her research skills like an X-ray technician, peeking beneath the painting’s shimmering surface to reveal secrets and betrayals at the heart of both a single Jewish family and French society ... The betrayals in this story are endless. Ostler’s book is one more effort, dogged and impressive, to set the record straight.
Gets bogged down in descriptions of parties and fashions and complicated family and friendship networks that are difficult to keep straight. The story of Renoir’s 'Pink and Blue' gets buried in the weeds, stalled by an overload of context.
In this thrilling book Catherine Ostler follows the story of the three Cahen d’Anvers sisters as they twinkle and twirl in belle époque Paris ... Paints a glittering picture of cake shops and cotillions, trips to the dressmaker and dancing till dawn, yachting on the Côte d’Azur and attending the races in Deauville ... Much more than an engrossing family saga about lucky people brought low ... Essential reading for our times, a terrible warning about how racial hatred can lie dormant for decades before reappearing with a vengeance in times of political and financial chill.
A narrative that moves between intimacy and the wider sweep of history ... What gives the book its particular resonance is the tension between what is seen and what is hidden ... In the end, The Renoir Girls is less about a painting than about what lies beyond its frame: the passage of time, the shifting of identities, the sudden and often catastrophic turns of history. It is a reminder that even the most serene images can contain within them the seeds of their own undoing.
A fascinating book ... Relying on gossip, supposition, contemporary writing, and family memories — plus a deep dive into French and English archives — Ostler pieces together what happened to the two girls in the decades after the portrait was completed. A final, thunder-clap revelation is the capstone of her absorbing account.
A considerable amount of research has clearly gone into this book. The variety of sources drawn on is impressive ... That said, when reading The Renoir Girls, all too often one has the feeling that the author is mastered by her documentation and not the reverse. Constant name-dropping weighs down the account. Quotations are strung together with little in between. Details spin out of control. Facts are sometimes mentioned twice within a few pages. There are recurring mistakes in patronyms or titles, sloppy translations, jarring changes of tense and other imperfections ... It would take a heavily revised and corrected edition to live up to at least some of the puff on the dust jacket of the elegant hardback.
On the one hand, The Renoir Girls is a story of the 0.01 percent, the upper crust (gratin). And on the other, it is a story of a Jewish family navigating timeless questions of love, war, marriage, and divorce, as well as pressures of modernity, including dilemmas about conversion and safety ... Ostler vividly describes the salons and parties at the Cahen d’Anver mansion in Paris ... Avoids the mythic ... Ostler provides a heavily detailed history of these critical junctures in modern French and Jewish life through the story of this once-renowned family and their lesser-known stories ... This is a modern biography that tends toward comprehensive over representative.
An impeccably researched, sweeping, densely rich chronicle ... Ostler has created an exceptional work of nonfiction, offering a fascinating and substantive examination of the rarefied lives of the one-percent financial elite through the history of the little-known Cahen d’Anvers family ... An impressive blend of biography and history.
This underwhelming history from former Tatler editor-in-chief Ostler (The Duchess Countess) spotlights the opulence, scandal, and tragedy of the Cahen d’Anvers family ... There are other delightful details buried within ... But this stultifies more often than it entertains.
