The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

by Edmund de Waal

  It makes me laugh out loud: a huge Renaissance bed, a lit de parade also hung with broderies. A high canopy with putti embowered in intricate patterns, grotesque heads, heraldic emblems, flowers and fruit. Two rich curtains are held back with heavily tasselled ropes, each with an E on a golden background. On the bedhead itself is another E. It is a sort of ducal bed – almost a princeling’s bed. It belongs to fantasy. It is a bed from which to rule a city state, give audiences, to write sonnets in, certainly to make love in. What kind of young man would buy a bed like this?

  I write down this long list of his new possessions and try to imagine being twenty-three, with these crates of treasures heaved up the winding stairs to the second floor and opened with all the shavings and splinters flying; arranging them in my own suite of rooms, trying out their disposition in relation to the morning sun that floods in from the street. As visitors come into the salon, should they see a wall of drawings or a tapestry? Should they glimpse my lit de parade? I imagine showing the enamels to my parents and my brothers, showing off to my family. And I have a sudden, embarrassed return to being sixteen and hauling my bed into the corridor in order to sleep on the floor, and tacking up a carpet over my mattress to make a canopy. And weekends spent rehanging my pictures and rearranging my books, trying out how it felt to change my own space. It feels eminently possible.

  It is, of course, a stage-set. All these things that Charles collected are objects that need a connoisseur’s eye, all are things that speak of knowledge, history, lineage, of collecting itself. Unpick this list of treasures – tapestries woven after Raphael cartoons, sculpture after Donatello – and you can feel that Charles has begun to internalise how art unfolds through history. Back in Paris he donates a rare fifteenth-century medallion of Hippolytus torn apart by wild horses to the Louvre. I think I can begin to hear the young art historian talking to visitors. You sense the notebook, not just the money.

  But I also begin to feel his pleasure in stuff here: the surprising weight of damask, the chill of the surface of enamels, the patina of bronzes, the heft of the raised thread on the embroideries.

  This first collection is totally conventional. Many of his parents’ friends would have had similar objects within their houses, and would have brought them together to make set-pieces of decorative sumptuousness, just as the young Charles created his own burgundy-and-gold mise en scène in his Parisian bedroom. It is just a smaller version of what was happening elsewhere in other Jewish households. He is showing, rather emphatically for a young man, how grown-up he is. And he is preparing himself for a life in public.

  If you wanted to see set-pieces at scale you could go to any of the Rothschild houses in Paris or, indeed, to James de Rothschild’s new palace at Ferrières, just outside the city. Here the works of the Renaissance Italy of merchants and bankers were celebrated: remember that great patronage comes through the astute use of money and is not hereditary. Rather than having a great hall, chivalric and Christian, Ferrières had a central indoor piazza with four great doorways leading to different parts of the house. Under a Tiepolo ceiling there was a gallery of tapestries of the Triumphs, sculptured figures in black-and-white marble, and pictures by Velázquez, Rubens, Guido Reni and Rembrandt. Above all, there was a lot of gold: gold on the furniture, on the picture frames, on the mouldings, in the tapestries, and embedded – everywhere – were gilded symbols of the Rothschilds. Le goût Rothschild had become a shorthand for gilding. Jews and their gold.

  Charles’s sensibility stops short of Ferrières. As does his space, of course: he only has his two salons and his bedroom. But Charles not only has a place in which he could arrange his new possessions and his books, but also has a sense of himself as a young scholar-collector. He is in the extraordinary position of being both ridiculously affluent and very self-directed.

  And neither of these things warms me to him at all. In fact the bed makes me feel a little queasy: I am not sure how much time I can face with this young man and his good eye for art and interior decoration, netsuke or no. Connoisseur, goes the alarm. And thinks he knows too much, too young.

  And, of course, much, much too rich for his own good.

  I realise that I must understand how Charles looked at things, and for this I must read his writings. I am in safe academic territory here: I will make a complete bibliography, and I will work my way through it in chronological order. I start by reading old volumes of the Gazette des beaux-arts from the time when Charles comes to live in Paris, noting down his first, rather dry published comments on Mannerist painters, bronzes and Holbein. I feel focused, if dutiful. He has a favourite Venetian painter, Jacopo de’ Barbari, who was keen on St Sebastian, the combat of Tritons and writhing bound nudes. I’m not sure how significant this taste for eroticised subjects will prove. I remember Laocoön and feel a little anxious.

  He starts poorly. There are notes on exhibitions, books, essays, and notes on publications: the expected art-historical detritus on the margins of other people’s scholarship (‘notes towards an authentication of’, ‘responses to the catalogue raisonné of’). These texts are a little like his Italian collections and I feel I am making scant headway. But, as the weeks go by, I find myself starting to relax into Charles’s company: this first collector of the netsuke begins to write more fluidly. There are unexpected registers of feeling. Three weeks of my precious spring go by, and then another fortnight, a mad expense of days unspooling in the dimness in Periodicals.

  Charles learns to spend time with a picture. He has been and looked, you feel, and then gone back and looked again. There are essays on exhibitions where you feel this touch on the shoulder, that turn to look again, move closer, move further away. You feel his growing confidence and his passion, and then at last the beginning of a steeliness in his writings, a dislike of set opinions. Charles holds his feelings in balance with his judgements, but writes so that you are aware of both. This is rare in writing on art, I think, as the weeks fall away from me in the library and my stack of Gazettes builds around me, a tower of new questions, each volume a matrix of bookmarks and yellow Post-it notes and reserve slips.

  My eyes hurt. The type is eight-point, less for the notes. At least my French is returning. I begin to think that I can work with this man. He is not showing off about how much he knows, most of the time. He wants to make us see more clearly what is in front of him. That seems honourable enough.

  3. ‘A MAHOUT TO GUIDE HER’

  It is not yet time for the netsuke to enter the story. Charles in his twenties is always elsewhere, in transit to somewhere, sending regards and his apologies for missing family gatherings, from London, Venice, Munich. He is starting to write a book on Dürer, the artist he fell for in the collections of Vienna, and he needs to find every drawing, every scribble in every archive, in order to do him justice.

  His two older brothers are safely ensconced in their own worlds. Jules is at the helm of Ephrussi et Cie in the rue de l’Arcade with his uncles. His early training in Vienna has paid off and he turns out to be very good with money. And he has got married in the synagogue in Vienna to Fanny, the clever, wry young widow of a Viennese financier. She is very rich, and it is all appropriately dynastic. The gossip in the papers in Paris and Vienna is that he danced with her every night until she wearied, gave in and married him.

  Ignace has cut loose. He is prone to falling spectacularly, serially, in love. As an amateur de la femme, his particular skill is an ability to climb buildings and into high windows for assignations – something I later find recalled in memoirs of elderly society ladies. He is a mondain, a Parisian man of the world, living between love-affairs, evenings at the Jockey Club – the epicentre of bachelor society – and duelling. This is illegal, but occupies the time of wealthy young men and army officers, who resort to rapiers over issues of minute transgressions of honour. Ignace turns up in the duelling manuals of the day, one newspaper recording an accident where his eye is almost taken out in a bout with his tutor. Ignace is ‘relativ
ely tall but a little under the average height…Gifted with energy which is also luckily backed up by steel muscles…Mr Ephrussi is one amongst the keenest…he is also one of the most friendly and frankest fencers I know.’

  Here he is, posed nonchalantly with a rapier, like a Hilliard miniature of an Elizabethan courtier: ‘an untiring sportsman, you will find him in the forest early in the morning, riding a superb dapple-grey; he has already taken his fencing lesson…’ I think of Ignace checking the lengths of the stirrups in the stables in the rue de Monceau. When he rides, his horse is arrayed ‘in the Russian manner’. I’m not quite sure what this entails, but it sounds splendid.

  It is in the salons that Charles first comes into view. He is noticed by the acidic novelist, diarist and collector Edmond de Goncourt in his journal. That people such as Charles were invited to salons at all disgusted the novelist: the salons had become ‘infested with Jews and Jewesses’. He comments on these new young men that he encounters: these Ephrussi were ‘mal élevés’, badly brought up, and ‘insupportables’, insufferable. Charles, he intimates, is ubiquitous, the trait of someone who does not know his place; he is hungry for contact, does not know when to shade eagerness and become invisible.

  Goncourt is jealous of this charming boy with the slightest of accents to his French. Charles has walked, seemingly without effort, into the formidable, fashionable salons of the day, each of which was a minefield of fiercely contested geographies of political, artistic, religious and aristocratic taste. There were many, but the three principal salons were those of Madame Straus (the widow of Bizet), of the Countess Greffulhe, and of a rarefied painter of watercolours of flowers, Madame Madeleine Lemaire. A salon consisted of a drawing-room full of regularly invited guests, meeting at a set time in the afternoon or evening. Poets, playwrights, painters, ‘clubmen’, mondains would meet under the patronage of a hostess to engage in conversation around issues of note, or purposeful gossip, or to listen to music or see a new society portrait unveiled. Each salon had its own distinct atmosphere and its own acolytes: those who offended Mme Lemaire were ‘bores’ or ‘deserters’.

  Mme Lemaire’s Thursday salon is mentioned in an early essay of the young Marcel Proust. He evokes the scent of lilacs filling her studio and drifting into the rue de Monceau, crowded with the carriages of the beau monde. You could never get through the rue de Monceau on a Thursday. Proust notices Charles. There is a hubbub and he moves closer through the throng of writers and socialites. Charles is there in a corner talking to a portrait painter, their heads bowed and conversing so softly and intensely that, though he hovers nearby, Proust cannot overhear even a scintilla of their conversation.

  Goncourt, splenetic, is particularly furious that young Charles has become a confidant of his Princess Mathilde, the niece of Bonaparte. She lives nearby in a vast mansion in the rue de Courcelles. He records gossip that she has been seen at Charles’s house in the rue de Monceau along with the ‘gratin’, the upper crust, of the aristocracy, that the Princess had found in Charles ‘a mahout to guide her through her life’. It is an unforgettable image of the formidable, aged Princess in her black, an elephantine presence rather like Queen Victoria, and this young man in his twenties, able to guide her with the merest of suggestions, of touch.

  Charles is starting to find a life for himself in this complex and snobbish city. He is beginning to discover the places where his conversation is welcomed, where his Jewishness is either acceptable or where it is overlooked. As a young writer on art, he goes to the offices of the Gazette des beaux-arts in the rue Favart each day – taking in six or seven salons en route, adds the omniscient Goncourt. From family house to these editorial offices is exactly twenty-five minutes’ brisk walk, or on my April morning forty-five minutes of flaneurial stroll. I suppose Charles might go in a carriage, I worry, but I can’t time that.

  The Gazette, the ‘Courrier européen de l’art et de la curiosité’, has a canary-yellow cover and on its title page an aesthetic display of Renaissance artefacts on top of a classical tomb surmounted by a furious-looking Leonardo. For your seven francs you get reviews of the different exhibitions jockeying for position in Paris, the Exposition des artistes indépendants, the official Salons hung floor to ceiling with paintings, the surveys at the Trocadéro and the Louvre. It is cuttingly described as ‘an expensive art-magazine which every great lady kept open but unread on her table’ and it certainly holds a reputation as an essential part of society life, a World of Interiors as well as an Apollo. In the beautiful oval library of the Camondo mansion down the hill from the Hôtel Ephrussi are shelves and shelves of its bound volumes.

  Here at the offices are other writers and artists, and the best art library in Paris, full of periodicals from all over Europe and catalogues of exhibitions. It is an exclusive arts club, a place to share news and gossip about which painter is working on which commission, who is out of favour with the collectors or with the jurists for the Salon. It is also busy. The Gazette is published monthly and so it is a real place of work. There are all the decisions to be taken on who will be writing on what, the ordering of engravings and illustrations. You can learn a lot by being here day by day, watching the arguments.

  When Charles, just back from his plundering of Italian art dealers, starts to write for the Gazette, it includes lavish engravings of the pictures of the day, artefacts mentioned in the scholarly reviews and key pictures from the Salon represented in careful reproduction. I pick out an issue at random from 1878. It includes, amongst other things, articles on Spanish tapestry, Greek archaic sculpture, the architecture of the Champ de Mars, and Gustave Courbet – all, of course, with illustrations interleaved with tissue mounts. It is the perfect journal for a young man to write for, a calling-card into those places where society and art intersect.

  I find the traces of these intersections by hacking my way assiduously through the social columns of Parisian newspapers of the 1870s. I start this as a necessary clearing of the undergrowth, but it becomes strangely compelling and a relief from my dogged attempt to chart every single one of Charles’s exhibition reviews. There are the same labyrinthine lists of encounters and guests, the minutiae of who wore what, who is to be seen, each run of names a calibration of snubs and fine judgements.

  I get particularly hooked by the listings of wedding-presents at society marriages, telling myself that this is all good research on cultures of gift-giving, and waste an embarrassing amount of time trying to work out who is being over-generous, who a cheapskate and who is just dull. My great-great-grandmother gives a set of golden serving dishes shaped like cockle shells at a society wedding in 1874. Vulgar, I think, with nothing to back this up.

  And amongst all these Parisian balls and musical soirées, the salons and receptions, I start to find mentions of the three brothers. They stick together: the MM. Ephrussi are seen in the box at a premiere at the Opéra, at funerals, at the receptions of Prince X, Countess Y. The Tsar has made a visit to the city and they are there to greet him as prominent Russian citizens. They give parties jointly, are noted for the ‘grand series of dinners they are hosting together’, have been spotted, along with other sportsmen, on the latest thing, the bicycle. One column of Le Gaulois is devoted to déplacements – who is off to Deauville and who to Chamonix – so I know when they leave Paris for their holidays in Meggen at Jules and Fanny’s baronial Chalet Ephrussi. From their golden house on the hill they seem to have become an accepted part of Parisian society within a few years of their arrival. Monceau, I remember, quick-going.

  The elegant Charles has new interests apart from rearranging his rooms and perfecting his sinuous art-historical sentences. He has a mistress. And he has started to collect Japanese art. These two things, sex and Japan, are intertwined.

  He owns no netsuke yet, but he is getting much closer. I am willing him on as he starts his collection, buying lacquer from a dealer in Japanese art called Philippe Sichel. Goncourt writes in his journal that he has been to Sichel’s, ‘the p
lace where Jewish money comes’ he goes into a back room in search of the latest objet, the newest album of erotic prints, a scroll maybe. Here he comes across ‘la Cahen d’Anvers, crouched over a Japanese lacquer box with her lover, the young Ephrussi’.

  She is indicating to him ‘the time and place that he can make love with her’.

  4. ‘SO LIGHT, SO SOFT TO THE TOUCH’

  Charles’s lover is Louise Cahen d’Anvers. She is a couple of years older than Charles and very pretty, with red-gold hair. ‘La Cahen d’Anvers’ is married to a Jewish banker and they have four small children, a boy and three girls. The fifth child arrives and Louise calls him Charles.

  I only know about Parisian marriages from the novels of Nancy Mitford, but this strikes me as extraordinarily sanguine. And rather impressive – I want to be bourgeois and ask how you find time for five children, a husband and a lover? The two clans are very close. In fact, as I stand in the place d’Iéna outside Jules and Fanny’s marital home, his initials floridly entwined with hers above the grander doors, I find that I am looking straight across the road to Louise’s equally baroque new palace at the corner of the rue de Bassano. At this point I wonder if the clever, indefatigable Fanny arranged this affair for her best friend.

  There was certainly something very intimate about the whole arrangement. They met constantly at the round of receptions and balls and the two families often holidayed together at the Chalet Ephrussi in Switzerland or at the Cahen d’Anvers chateau at Champs-sur-Marne just outside Paris. What was the etiquette of meeting your friend on the way up the stairs to your brother-in-law’s apartment? These lovers might have needed the back rooms of dealers just to get away from all this smothering, knowing amiability. And the children.