Pink and Blue

Pink and Blue, also known as Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d'Anvers, is an oil on canvas portrait painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in Paris in 1881; it has belonged to the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) in Brazil since 1952.

The sitters are the two younger daughters of the Jewish banker Louis Raphaël Cahen d'Anvers and his wife Louise: Elisabeth, born in December 1874, and Alice, born in February 1876. Renoir was introduced to the family by the collector Charles Ephrussi, owner of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. He had first painted their eldest daughter, Irène, in a portrait now in the E. G. Bührle Foundation in Zurich; the two younger girls were then painted together. The sittings went on until the end of February 1881, after which Renoir left for Algiers. Louise Cahen d'Anvers paid him 1,500 francs, but the parents were reportedly not pleased with the result, and the canvas was hung in the servants' quarters of the house.

The girls, six and five years old at the time, stand hand in hand before a heavy dark curtain: Alice in pink at left, Elisabeth in blue at right. MASP's curators point to the detailed rendering of the lace dresses, the raised white touches that model the frills and the sheen of the satin sashes. According to the MASP catalogue, the popular title referring to the colours of the dresses dates from 1900, when the picture was shown at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris.

In 1987, while the MASP collection was on view at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny, Switzerland, Elisabeth's nephew recognised her in the painting and wrote to the museum about her fate: although she had converted to Catholicism, she was deported because of her Jewish origins and died in 1944, aged 69, on the way to Auschwitz. Alice lived until 1965. The painting measures 119 × 75.5 cm and is among the most popular works in the MASP collection.