Comte Louis Cahen d'Anvers, a French banker, commissioned Renoir in 1880 to paint a portrait of his eldest daughter Irène, who was 8 years old at the time. The count was so dissatisfied with the painting that he delayed paying Renoir and the painting was relegated to the servants’ quarters in the family house

Irène’s first husband was Moïse de Camondo, member of a prominent European Jewish banking family, with whom she had 2 children: Nissim, who died in combat during World War I, and Béatrice, who inherited this painting

After the Fall of France in 1940, Béatrice and her daughters were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp and murdered there. This portrait by Renoir was looted by the Nazi in the following year and sent into the personal collection of Hermann Göring, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany

This painting was displayed in a 1946 Paris exhibition titled “French Masterpieces Found in Germany” and was noticed by Irène herself, who modelled for it 66 years ago! The work was restituted to Irène, the sole beneficiary of the assets of her daughter Béatrice. Irène sold the painting in 1949 to a Paris gallery, which later onsold it to Emil Georg Bührle, a German industrialist who became a naturalized Suisse in 1937 (Around WWII he was Switzerland's richest man by supplying weapons to Nazi Germany)

Irène squandered her wealth in the casinos of the French Riviera, and died at the age of 91 in 1963 in Paris