Tuesday, October 27, 2026 at 12 pm EDT (18:00 CEST)
Using Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Petite Irène as a case study, Doreen Carvajal will trace the painting from the Cahen d’Anvers family through wartime seizure, Hermann Göring’s network, recovery by the Monuments Men, and its postwar acquisition by Emil Bührle.
Carvajal will focus on what archival research can still uncover, including discoveries in the once opaque Bührle archives in Zurich and at the French Ministry of Defense archives in Caen that helped reconstruct the painting’s wartime, postwar history, sales negotiations and fate of the Cahen d’Anvers family.
This virtual presentation coincides with the release of Carvajal’s The Girl in Blue: Renoir’s Portrait of a Dynasty Erased from Grand Central Publishing in late October, “A vivid and deeply reported portrait of looted art, memory, and one family’s struggle for survival and justice during one of history’s darkest eras.” (New York Times bestselling author Dana Candy)
Doreen Carvajal is a journalist, author, and former New York Times reporter. Trained as an art merchant at the French auction house Drouot in Paris, she brings a reporter’s eye to the intertwined histories of art, war, memory, and restitution. Her new book, The Girl in Blue: Renoir’s Portrait of a Dynasty Erased, published by Grand Central Publishing, follows the extraordinary afterlife of Renoir’s portrait of Irène Cahen d’Anvers and the fate of the Jewish family behind it. She is also the author of The Forgetting River, a memoir tracing family secrets, religious identity, and the enduring legacy of the Spanish Inquisition. She lives in a 300-year-old stone farmhouse in Impressionist country near the Oise River outside Paris.
