Mlle Irene Cahen d'Anvers

An eight-year-old girl with a blue ribbon, painted by Renoir in 1880. Her father disliked the portrait. Then it was looted by the Nazis, and today it is counted among Renoir's masterpieces.

The story behind the painting

In the 1870s and 1880s Renoir often painted portraits for families of the Parisian Jewish community. Through the collector Charles Ephrussi, owner of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, he met the banker Louis Cahen d'Anvers, whose family was one of the wealthiest Jewish banking families in Paris. In 1880 Louis commissioned two portraits of his three daughters. This one shows the eldest, Irene, at the age of eight. Her younger sisters Alice and Elisabeth appear in a later picture now known as Pink and Blue.

What to look for

The painting is known by several names: Portrait of Irene Cahen d'Anvers, The Little Girl with the Blue Ribbon, and Little Irene, and the blue ribbon gives it its popular title. It is an oil on canvas of modest size, 65 by 54 cm according to Wikidata, and it is one of two portraits her father ordered of his daughters, the other showing her younger sisters together. Our sources say little more about the surface itself, so take your time: the subject is simply a child of eight, painted by Renoir at a moment when he often worked as a portraitist for Parisian families.

Meaning and intent

For an unknown reason, Louis Cahen d'Anvers was so dissatisfied with the picture that he hung it in the servants' quarters and delayed paying Renoir. It was first shown in 1883, in the first exhibition devoted only to Renoir, at Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery. Irene herself had a long and difficult life. She married Count Moise de Camondo in 1891; their son Nissim was killed as a pilot in 1917, and their daughter Beatrice and her family were murdered at Auschwitz. Irene survived the war in hiding in Paris and died in 1963, aged 91.

Legacy

In 1910 the Camondo family bought the painting. After the fall of France it was looted by the Nazis from the Chateau de Chambord and entered Hermann Goring's collection, who later traded it away. In 1946 it reappeared in Paris among the French masterpieces found in Germany. It was later acquired by Emil Georg Buhrle, a Swiss industrialist and arms maker who had supplied the German military, and it remains in the Foundation E. G. Buhrle Collection in Zurich. It appeared in the film The Monuments Men in 2014 and drew crowds in Tokyo in 2018.