Mlle Irene Cahen d'Anvers

The girl with the long red hair was eight years old in 1880, the daughter of a wealthy Parisian banking family, and Renoir was hired to paint her. Her name was Irène Cahen d'Anvers. The picture's later life is harder than its gentle surface suggests. In July 1941 it was looted by German forces from a château in the Loire, where Jewish collectors had sent their art for safekeeping, and it passed into Hermann Göring's hands. Irène herself survived the war hidden in Paris under an Italian passport. Her daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren did not; they were murdered at Auschwitz. After the war the portrait surfaced in a Paris exhibition of works recovered from Germany, and Irène, by then an old woman, recognised the child she had once been. It hangs today in the Bührle collection in Zürich.