In the fall of 1939, Léon Reinach packed a painting into a crate. It was Renoir's La Petite Irène, a portrait of his mother-in-law at age 8. He sent it from his home outside Paris to the Château de Chambord, where the Mona Lisa was also kept. He thought the château would keep it safe from the Nazis. It did the opposite. The crate told the looters whose painting it was, and that marked his family. Gioia Diliberto reviews two new books on the story in this weekend's Journal.
Louis and Louise Cahen d'Anvers were Jewish financiers who settled in Paris in the mid-19th century. They lived grandly on the Right Bank and knew royalty. In 1880 they hired Renoir to paint Irène, age 8. The next year he painted Alice and Elisabeth, 5 and 6, in Pink and Blue. The parents didn't like it. Alice later thought they “found it too avant-garde.” They put it in the servants' quarters and were slow to pay the 1,500 francs they owed. Renoir complained to a friend, in antisemitic terms the reviewer calls common in France then.
In 1891 the parents married Irène, then 19, to Moïse Camondo, a banking heir 12 years older. The marriage was miserable. She had two children, then left her husband for the man who ran the family's stables. Her mother gave La Petite Irène to Irène's daughter, Beatrice. It hung in the living room Beatrice shared with her husband, Léon Reinach, until 1939.
What the crate did
The Germans didn't touch the French state's own art at Chambord. Anything labeled as a Jewish family's property was taken and shipped to the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the clearing house for looted art. Reinach wrote letter after letter demanding the painting back. The letters reached the Nazis, who marked him as insolent. That, Carvajal writes, led to the family's tracking and arrest. In 1942 Léon, Beatrice and their children Fanny and Bertrand were sent to Drancy, then to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Elisabeth was betrayed in 1944 by a village mayor and died at Auschwitz too. Irène hid in her Paris apartment through the war.
Two of the U.S. Army's Monuments Men traced the painting after the war to a German art dealer, and France got it back. The buyer, in 1949, was Emil Georg Bührle. He was a Swiss industrialist, and he had sold arms to the Third Reich. The seller was Irène, the girl in the picture. The painting hangs today in the Zurich museum that bears his name. Pink and Blue was sold before the war and hangs in São Paulo.
Our read
This is an estate story, and we'll keep the planning point in its place. No plan could have stood against what happened to this family, and we won't draw a tip from that part. What the books do show is what lasted. The fortune, the mansion, the titles, all erased. Two paintings lasted. One spent years with the servants because the parents didn't care for it. The other was sold by the girl in it. The things a family prizes aren't always the things that survive. And the things that survive don't always stay in the family.
The one thing in your plan this touches is the heirloom line. A painting, a ring, a watch, a desk with a story. Most estate plans never name them. One check this week. Pick the one object in your house that matters most. Write down who it goes to, what it's worth and where the record lives, a photo, a receipt or an appraisal. Then tell that person. A plan nobody else can find isn't a plan. Bring the list to the next review and we'll put it on paper. The umbrella only helps if someone else knows where you keep it.