Author Interview: Doreen Carvajal | The Girl in Blue

My guest this week was Doreen Carvajal, author of The Girl in Blue: Renoir's Portrait of a Dynasty Erased. In our conversation, Carvajal shared her insights into the girl behind the portrait, her family and what happened to them during World War 2.

Find Doreen Carvajal online:

https://www.doreencarvajal.net

Buy the book on Amazon or your favorite bookstore.

In 1880, French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir was hired by a wealthy Parisian family to paint their eight-year-old daughter, Irène Cahen d'Anvers. The resulting portrait, titled La Petite Irène (or The Girl in Blue), depicts a quiet young girl with flowing reddish hair, a pale blue dress, and piercing blue eyes. Renoir created the painting during an important shift in his career, combining his signature soft brushstrokes with sharp, delicate details in Irène’s face. Remarkably, he painted parts of the work using his left hand after breaking his right arm in an accident. Decades later during World War II, the masterpiece was stolen by Nazi art looters and traded among high-ranking German officials before Allied "Monuments Men" recovered it in Bavaria in 1945. Restituted to an elderly Irène and later acquired by the Kunsthaus Zürich, La Petite Irène stands today as both an Impressionist treasure and an enduring symbol of survival and loss.

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