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

by Edmund de Waal

  Charles, this increasingly adept and helpful young man of the salons, arranged for his society friend Léon Bonnat to do a pastel portrait of Louise. She is pictured in a pale dress, looking down demurely, her hair half-hiding her face.

  In fact, Louise was far from demure. Goncourt records her with his novelist’s eye, on Saturday 28th February 1876, in her salon:

  The Jews retain, from their oriental origin, a peculiar nonchalance. Today, I was charmed as I observed Mme Louise Cahen fishing in the bottom of her vitrine of porcelain and lacquer ware, wanting to hand me some; she moved like a lazy cat. And when they are blond – these Jews – there is, at the heart of their blondness, something golden, like the painting of the MISTRESS OF TITIAN. Her search completed, the Jewess dropped onto a chaise longue, her head flung back to one side and revealing at the head, a coil of hair that resembled a nest of snakes. Pulling various amused, questioning expressions, and, wrinkling her nose, she complained of the unreasonableness of men and of novelists expecting women not to be human creatures and not to have, in love, the same disgust as men.

  It is an unforgettable image of eroticised langour: the mistress of Titian is indeed very golden and very naked, one hand loosely covering herself. You sense Louise’s power over the famous writer, her control of the situation. She is, after all, ‘ma muse alpha’ for Paul Bourget, another popular novelist of the day. In the portrait she commissioned of herself for her own salon from Carolus-Duran, the society painter of the moment, she is barely contained in her swirling gown, her lips slightly parted. There is a lot of drama in this muse. It makes me wonder why she wanted this aesthetic young man as a lover.

  It may have been his lack of histrionics, the deliberative pace of an art historian. Or it may have been due to her having two huge households, a husband and a run of children, whilst Charles was unencumbered, perfectly free to entertain her when she needed distraction. It is certain that the lovers shared a real interest in music, art and poetry – and in musicians, artists and poets. Louise’s brother-in-law, Albert, was a composer, and Charles and Louise went with him to the Opéra in Paris, and to the more radical premieres in Brussels to hear Massenet. They were both passionate about Wagner, a kind of passion that is hard to dissemble, but good to share. Wagner’s operas, I imagine, also give the couple plenty of time to themselves in one of those deep, plush boxes at the Opéra. They were present at a small and select dinner party (sans the husband) followed by a recital of poetry by Anatole France, hosted by Proust.

  And they buy Japanese black-and-gold lacquer boxes together for their parallel collections: they start their love-affair with Japan.

  It is with Louise, weary after an argument with her husband or with Charles, indolently fishing in her vitrine of Japanese lacquer bibelots, then falling back on to her chaise longue, that I know that I am getting closer to the netsuke. They are coming into focus, part of a complex, fractious Paris life that really existed.

  I want to find how these nonchalant Parisians, Charles and his lover, handled Japanese things. What was it like to have something so alien in your hands for the first time, to pick up a box or a cup – or a netsuke – in a material that you had never encountered before and shift it around, finding its weight and balance, running a fingertip along the raised decoration of a stork in flight through clouds? There must be a literature on touch somewhere, I think; someone must have recorded in a diary or a letter the fugitive moment of what they felt when they picked one up. There must be a trace of their hands somewhere.

  Goncourt’s aside is a good place to start. Charles and Louise bought their first pieces of Japanese lacquer from the house of the Sichel brothers. It was not a gallery where each collector was reverently shown objets and prints in separate booths, as at the up-market gallery of Siegfried Bing, the Oriental Art Boutique, but an over-flowing morass of everything Japanese. The quantities were overwhelming. Philippe Sichel sent forty-five crates with 5,000 objects back from Yokohama after one buying trip in 1874 alone. This created a febrile atmosphere. What was here, and where was it? Would other collectors find the treasure before you?

  This mass of Japanese art inspired reverie. Goncourt recorded a day spent at the Sichels soon after a delivery had arrived from Japan, surrounded by ‘tout cet art capiteux et hallucinatoire’ – all this intoxicating, mesmerising art. Since 1859 prints and ceramics had begun to seep into France; by the early 1870s this had become a flood of things. A writer looking back on the very earliest days of this infatuation with Japanese art wrote in the Gazette in 1878:

  One kept oneself informed about new cargoes. Old ivories, enamels, faience and porcelain, bronzes, lacquer, wooden sculptures…embroidered satins, playthings, simply arrived at a merchant’s shop and immediately left for artists’ studios or writers’ studies…They entered the hands of…Carolus Duran, Manet, James Tissot, Fantin-Latour, Degas, Monet, the writers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Philippe Burty, Zola…the travellers Cernuschi, Duret, Emile Guimet…The movement was established, the amateurs followed.

  Even more extraordinary was the occasional sight of:

  young men in our great faubourgs, on our boulevards, in the theatre, whose appearance surprises us…They wear top hats or small rounded felt ones resting on fine and lustrous black hair, long and straight back, the cloth frock coat is correctly buttoned, clear grey trousers, fine shoes and with a cravat of some dark colour floating on the elegant linen. If the jewel that fixes this cravat was not too visible, the trousers not splayed by the instep, the top boots not too glossy, the cane not too light, – these nuances betray the man who submits to the taste of his tailor instead of imposing his taste on them, – we would take them to be Parisians. You cross them on the pavement, you look at them: their skin is lightly bronzed, the beard rare; some of them have adopted the moustache…the mouth is large, conformed to open squarely, in the fashion of masks in Greek comedy; the cheek-bones become round and the forehead protuberant on the oval of the face; the external angles of the small bridled eyes, but black and alive, with a piercing gaze, lift towards the temples. They are the Japanese.

  It is a breath-catching description of being a stranger in a new culture, almost imperceptible except for your meticulous dress. The passer-by takes a second look, and it is only the completeness of your disguise that gives you away.

  It also reveals the strangeness of this encounter with Japan. Though the Japanese were extremely rare in Paris in the 1870s – there were delegations and diplomats and the odd prince – their art was ubiquitous. Everyone had to get their hands on these japonaiseries: all the painters Charles was starting to meet in the salons, all the writers Charles knew from the Gazette, his family, his family friends, his lover, all were living through this convulsion. Fanny Ephrussi records in her letters shopping trips to Mitsui, a fashionable shop in the rue Martel that sold Far Eastern objects, to buy Japanese wallpaper for the new smoking-room and guest bedrooms in the house that she and Jules had just finished building in the place d’Iéna. How could Charles, the critic, the well-dressed amateur d’art and collector, not buy Japanese art?

  In the Parisian artistic hothouse it mattered when you started your collection. Earlier collectors, japonistes, had the edge as they were men of superior appreciation and creators of taste. Goncourt, naturally, managed to suggest that he and his brother had actually seen Japanese prints before the opening up of Japan. These early adopters of Japanese art, though fiercely competitive with each other, shared their discernment. But, as George Augustus Sala wrote in Paris Herself Again in 1878, the collegial atmosphere of earlier collecting soon disappeared. ‘Japonisme has become to some very artistic amateurs, the Ephrussi, the Camondos, like a sort of religion.’

  Charles and Louise were ‘néojaponistes’, young and rich artistic latecomers. For with Japanese art there was an exhilarating lack of connoisseurship, none of the enmeshed knowledge of art historians to confound your immediate responses, your intuitions. Here was a new Renaissance unfolding and the chance to
have the ancient and serious art of the East in your hands. You could have it in quantity and you could have it now. Or you could buy it now and make love later.

  When you held a Japanese objet, it revealed itself. Touch tells you what you need to know: it tells you about yourself. Edmond de Goncourt offered his view: ‘here, in respect to politeness, gentleness, unctuousness so to speak, of perfect things in one’s hands: an aphorism. Touch – it is the mark by which the amateur recognises himself. The man who handles an object with indifferent fingers, with clumsy fingers, with fingers that do not envelop lovingly is a man who is not passionate about art.’

  For these early collectors and travellers to Japan, it was enough to pick up a Japanese object to know whether it was ‘right’ or not. Indeed, the American artist John La Farge on his trip in 1884 made a pact with his friends ‘that we should bring no books, read no books, but come as innocently as we could’. Having a feel for beauty was enough: touch was a kind of sensory innocence.

  Japanese art was a brave new world: it introduced new textures, new ways of feeling things. Though there were all those albums of wood block prints to buy, this was not art simply to hang on walls. This was an epiphany of new materials: bronzes of a depth of patina that seemed far greater than those of the Renaissance; lacquers of an unequalled depth and darkness; folding screens of gold leaf to bisect a room, throw light. Monet painted La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume); Camille Monet’s robe had ‘certain gold embroideries several centimetres thick’. And there were objects that were unlike anything seen in Western art, objects that could only be described as ‘playthings’, small carvings of animals and beggars called ‘netsuke’ that you could roll in your hands. Charles’s friend and editor of the Gazette, the collector Louis Gonse, described a particular boxwood netsuke beautifully as ‘plus gras, plus simple, plus caresse’ – very rich, very simple, very tactile. It is difficult to beat this cadence of response.

  This was all stuff to have in your hands, stuff to add texture to your salon or your boudoir. As I look at the images of Japanese things, I see that the Parisians are layering one material on another: an ivory is wrapped in a silk, a silk is hanging behind a lacquer table, a lacquer table is spread with porcelain, fans fall across a floor.

  Passionate touch, discovery in the hands, things enveloped lovingly, plus caresse. Japonisme and touch were a seductive combination for Charles and Louise, amongst many others.

  Before the netsuke comes a collection of thirty-three black-and-gold lacquer boxes. It was a collection to place with Charles’s other collections in his apartment at the Hôtel Ephrussi, something to sit near his burgundy Renaissance hangings and his pale Donatello sculpture in marble. Charles and Louise put this collection together from Sichel’s chaotic house of treasures. It was a stellar group of seventeenth-century lacquers, as good as any in Europe: to choose them they must have been regular visitors to Sichel’s. And very pleasingly for me as a potter, alongside these lacquers, Charles also had a sixteenth-century stoneware covered jar from Bizen, the Japanese pottery village in which I studied when I was seventeen, excited to finally get my passionate hands on those simple, tactile tea-bowls.

  In Les lacques japonais au Trocadéro, a long essay published in the Gazette in 1878, Charles describes the five or six vitrines full of lacquer on exhibition at the Trocadéro in Paris. This is his fullest writing about Japanese art. As elsewhere, he is in turn academic (he is exercised about dating), descriptive and ultimately lyrical about what he sees in front of him.

  He mentions the term japonisme ‘coined by my friend Philippe Burty’. For three whole weeks, before I find an even earlier mention, I think this is the first ever use of the term in print, and am filled with excitement that my netsuke and japonisme are linked so beautifully, a told-you-so moment of visceral happiness in the Publications section of the library.

  Japanese box of golden lacquer from the collection of Louise Cahen d’Anvers

  Charles gets very, very excited in this essay. He has discovered that Marie Antoinette had a collection of Japanese lacquer, and uses this knowledge to negotiate a lovely correspondence between the civilised world of the eighteenth-century rococo and that of Japan. In his essay, women, intimacy and lacquer seem to be woven together. Japanese lacquer, Charles explains, was rarely seen in Europe: ‘One simultaneously needed wealth and the fortune of being a favourite or a queen to reach for the envied possession of these almost unobtainable objects.’ But this is a moment – Paris in the Third Republic – when two remote and alienated worlds have collided. These lacquers, of a legendary rarity and so technically complex that they are almost unmakeable, the possessions of Japanese princes or Western queens, are now here in a Parisian shop, available to buy. For Charles, this lacquer has a quality of embedded poetry: not just rich and strange, but latent with stories of desire. His passion for Louise is palpable. The unobtainability of this lacquer creates the aura that surrounds it. You feel him reaching towards the golden Louise as he writes.

  And then Charles picks a box up: ‘Take one of these lacquer boxes in your hand – so light, so soft to the touch, on which the artist has represented apple trees in blossom, sacred cranes flying across the water, and topping a mountain range, undulating under a cloud-filled sky, some people in flowing robes, in poses that seem bizarre to us but always gracious and elegant, under their large parasols…’

  Holding this box, he talks about its exoticism. Its accomplishment requires a suppleness of the hand that is ‘entirely feminine, a persevering dexterity, a sacrifice of time’ that we in the West could not achieve. When you see and hold these lacquers – or netsuke or bronzes – you are immediately conscious of this work: they embody all the travail, and yet they are miraculously free.

  The images in the lacquer interlace with his growing love of the paintings of the Impressionists: the images of flowering apple trees, cloud-filled skies and women in flowing robes are straight out of Pissarro and Monet. Japanese things – lacquers, netsuke, prints – conjure a picture of a place where sensations are always new, where art pours out of daily life, where everything exists in a dream of endless beautiful flow.

  And embedded in Charles’s essay on lacquer are engravings of pieces from Louise’s collection and his own. His prose becomes a little much here, a little breathless, as he describes the interior of Louise’s cabinet of golden lacquer, over which morning glories trail. Their collections are formed by ‘the caprice of an opulent amateur who can satisfy all his covetousness’. In talking of their collections of these strangely rich objects he quietly brings himself and Louise together. They are both covetous and capricious, led by sudden desire. What they collect are objects to discover in your hands, ‘so light, so soft to the touch’.

  It is a discreetly sensual act of disclosure, showing their pieces together in public. And assembling these lacquers also records their assignations: the collection records their love-affair, their own secret history of touch.

  There is a review in Le Gaulois of an exhibition in 1884 of Charles’s lacquers. ‘One could spend days in front of these vitrines,’ writes the reviewer. I agree. I cannot trace which museums Charles and Louise’s lacquers have disappeared into, but I go back to Paris for a day to the Musée Guimet on the place d’Iéna, which now holds Marie Antoinette’s collection, and stand in front of their vitrines full of the mazy reflections of these softly gleaming things.

  He brings these dense black-and-gold objets to his salon in the rue de Monceau, where he has recently laid down a golden Savonnerie carpet. It is finely woven from silk, made originally for a gallery in the Louvre in the seventeenth century. Its imagery is an allegory of Air: the four winds blowing their trumpets with fat cheeks, and everything is interlaced with butterflies and undulating ribbons. The carpet has been cut down in size so that it fits. I imagine walking across this floor. The whole room is golden.

  5. A BOX OF CHILDREN’S SWEETS

  To buy a little of Japan the best thing to do was to vis
it the place. This was the ultimate bit of one-upmanship of Charles’s neighbour Henri Cernuschi, or the industrialist Emile Guimet, the organiser of the Trocadéro exhibition.

  If you could not match that, then you had to visit Parisian galleries for Japanese bibelots. These shops were known as places for encounters, popular sites for rendezvous for beau-monde lovers – rendez-vous des couples adultères, like Charles and Louise. In the old days, you would find these couples in the Jonque Chinoise, the shop in the rue de Rivoli, or its companion shop, the Porte Chinoise, in the rue Vivienne, where the galleriste Madame Desoye – who had sold Japanese art to the first wave of collectors – sat ‘enthroned in her jewels…almost a historic figure in our time like a fat Japanese idol’. Now Sichel’s had taken over.

  Sichel was a great salesman, but not a curious or observant anthropologist. In a pamphlet published in 1883, Notes d’un bibeloteur au Japon, he wrote, ‘The country was entirely new to me: if I speak frankly I wasn’t interested in day-to-day life at all: all I wanted was to get the lacquers from the bazaar.’

  And this is all he did. Soon after his arrival in 1874 in Japan, Sichel discovered a group of lacquer writing-boxes hidden under layers of dust in a Nagasaki bazaar. He ‘paid one dollar for each, and today many of these objects are valued at over 1,000 francs’. These were the writing-boxes that he sold – he fails to say – to his Parisian clients like Charles or Louise or Gonse for a great deal more than 1,000 francs.