The Girl in Blue
A looted masterpiece. The girl in the painting who vanished. A Jewish family that refused to let it go.
In 1941, a Nazi looting unit seized Renoir’s La Petite Irène from the château of Chambord in France, sending the luminous portrait of an eight-year-old girl into the machinery of war. It would pass through Hermann Göring, art dealers, and Monuments Men investigators before resurfacing in the postwar art market— acquired by an industrialist whose fortune was built supplying arms to Nazi Germany.
The girl it immortalized, Irène Cahen d’Anvers—a countess who defied convention, fled an arranged marriage, and remade herself 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.
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About Doreen Carvajal
Doreen Carvajal was born and raised in California. She studied journalism as an undergraduate at The University of California at Berkeley and San Jose State University. She worked as a journalist for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times and other publications for more than 25 years, covering a myriad of topics. Her first book, The Forgetting River, was about her search to recover her Catholic family’s hidden Sephardic Jewish roots in a mystical white pueblo on Spain’s southern frontier in Andalusia. She lives outside Paris in Impressionist country in a stone farmhouse.