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

by Edmund de Waal

  Sichel continues:

  In those days Japan was a treasure trove of art objects to be had at bargain prices. The streets of its cities were lined with shops of curios, textiles and pawn goods. Throngs of tradespeople would gather at one’s door at dawn: vendors of fukusa [scrolls] or bronze merchants carrying their goods in carts. There were even passers-by who would quite willingly sell the netsuke from their obi [belts]. The barrage of offers was so incessant that one was almost overwhelmed by a weariness and a distaste for buying. Nevertheless, these merchants in exotic objects were amiable tradesmen. They acted as your guide, bargained on your behalf in return for just a box of children’s sweets, and concluded business deals by throwing grand banquets in your honour which ended with enticing performances by female dancers and singers.

  Japan was that box of sweets. Collecting in Japan encouraged a striking greed. Sichel writes of the urge to ‘évaliser le Japon’ – to plunder or rape the country. The stories of destitute daimyos selling their heirlooms, samurai their swords, dancers their bodies – and passers-by their netsuke – became a story of endless possibility. Anyone would sell you anything. Japan existed as a sort of parallel country of licensed gratification, artistic, commercial and sexual.

  Japanese things carried an air of eroticised possibility, evoking not simply the shared encounter of lovers over a lacquer box or ivory bibelots. Japanese fans, bibelots and robes would only come alive in private encounters. They were props for dressing up, role-playing, the sensuous reimagining of the self. Of course they appealed to Charles with his ducal bed, canopied with swags of brocade, and his endless reconfiguring of his rooms in the rue de Monceau.

  In James Tissot’s La Japonaise au bain a girl is naked but for a heavy brocade kimono, loose on her shoulders, standing on the threshold of a Japanese room. In Monet’s provocative portrait of his wife Camille, she is shown in a golden wig, clothed in a swirling robe of embroidered red on which a samurai unsheathes his sword. Behind her is a scattering of fans across the wall and the floor, like a burst of Whistler’s fireworks. It is very much a performance for the artist, one akin to that in Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann of the demi-mondaine Odette receiving Swann, dressed in her kimono in her drawing-room of Japanese silk cushions and screens and lanterns, filled with its heavy scent of chrysanthemums, an olfactory japonisme.

  Ownership seemed transposed. These objects seemed to induce insatiability, to own you, make demands on you. Collectors themselves speak of the intoxication of hunting and buying, a process that could send you towards mania: ‘Of all the passions, of all without exception, the passion for the bibelot is perhaps the most terrible and invincible. The man smitten by an antique is a lost man. The bibelot is not only a passion, it is a mania,’ claimed the young writer Guy de Maupassant.

  A haunting self-description of this comes in a strange book written by Charles’s scourge, Edmond de Goncourt. In La maison d’un artiste Goncourt describes each room of his own house in Paris in painstaking detail – the boiseries, the pictures, the books, the objects – in an attempt to evoke each object and picture and their placement as an act of homage to his dead brother, with whom he had lived. In two volumes, each of more than 300 pages, Goncourt constructs an autobiography and a travelogue, as much as an exhaustive inventory of a house through objects. Japanese art saturates the house. There are Japanese brocades and kakemonos, scrolls, in the hall. Even the garden is a carefully curated assortment of Chinese and Japanese trees and shrubs.

  In a moment worthy of Borges, his collection even incorporates a grouping of Chinese art put together by a seventeenth-century Japanese ‘bibeloteur exotique’. There is endless play in Goncourt’s display between pictures, screens, scrolls on open display and those objects held in vitrines.

  I imagine Goncourt, dark-eyed, an unruly white silk scarf knotted under his chin, pausing for effect at the door of his pearwood vitrine. He is holding one of his netsuke, and he starts to tell a story of the obsessive search for perfection that lies behind each object:

  a whole class of exceptionally fine artists – usually specialists – are responsible for…fabrication and dedicate themselves exclusively to the reproduction of an object or a creature. Thus, we hear of an artist whose family has for three generations sculpted rats in Japan, nothing but rats. Alongside these professional artists, amid this manually gifted populace, there would be amateur netsuke sculptors, who amuse themselves by sculpting a little masterpiece for themselves. One day, Mr Philippe Sichel approached a Japanese man sitting on his threshold, notching a netsuke that was in its last stages of completion. Mr Sichel asked him if he would like to sell it…when it was completed. The Japanese man started laughing, and ended up telling him that that would take approximately a further eighteen months; then he showed him another netsuke that was attached to his belt, and informed him that it had taken him several years of work to make it. And as the conversation progressed between the two men, the amateur artist confessed to Mr Sichel that he did ‘not work like that in such a long-drawn out manner…that he needed to be in the process…that it was only on certain days…on days when he had smoked a pipe or two, after he felt gay and refreshed’, essentially letting him know that for this work, he needed hours of inspiration.

  These bibelots of ivory or lacquer or mother-of-pearl all seemed to express the fact that Japanese workers had the imagination of makers of ‘bijoux-joujoux lilliputiens’, charming Lilliputian trinkets. That the Japanese are small, and make small things, was a commonplace in Paris. This idea of the miniature was often held as the reason that Japanese art seemed to lack ambition. They were brilliant at the laborious fashioning of rapid feeling, but fell down when it came to the grander feelings of tragedy or awe. That is why they lacked a Parthenon, a Rembrandt.

  What they could do was everyday life. And emotion. It was these emotions that entranced Kipling when he first saw netsuke in Japan on his travels in 1889. He writes in one of his letters from Japan of:

  a shop full of the wrecks of old Japan…The Professor raves about the cabinets in old gold and ivory studded with jade, lazuli, agate, mother-o’-pearl and cornelian, but to me more desirable than any wonder of five-stoned design are the buttons and netsuke that lie on cotton wool, and can be taken out and played with. Unfortunately the merest scratch of Japanese character is the only clue to the artist’s name, so I am unable to say who conceived, and in creamy ivory executed, the old man horribly embarrassed by a cuttle-fish; the priest who made the soldier pick up a deer for him and laughed to think that the brisket would be his and the burden his companion’s; or the dry, lean snake coiled in derision on a jawless skull mottled with the memories of corruption; or the Rabelaisian badger who stood on his head and made you blush though he was not half an inch long; or the little fat boy pounding his smaller brother; or the rabbit that had just made a joke; or – but there were scores of these notes, born of every mood of mirth, scorn and experience that sways the heart of man; and by this hand that has held half a dozen of them in its palm I winked at the shade of the dead carver! He had gone to his rest, but he had worked out in ivory three or four impressions that I had been hunting after in cold print.

  And the Japanese could do erotica. This was hunted with a particular passion: Goncourt talked of his ‘debauches’ buying it at Sichel’s. Shunga – prints of acrobatic sexual positions or bizarre encounters between courtesans and fantastical creatures – were hunted out by Degas and Manet. Octopuses were especially favoured as their sinuosity offered great inventive possibilities. Goncourt records that he has just bought ‘an album of Japanese obscenities…They amuse me, enchant my eyes…The violence of the lines, unexpected conjunctions, the arrangement of the accessories, the caprice in their positioning and the clothes, the…picturesque quality of the genitals.’ Erotic netsuke were also highly popular with Parisian collectors. Stock themes included countless octopuses embracing naked girls, monkeys carrying very large and phallic mushrooms, and burst persimmons.

 
These erotic objets complemented other Western objects for male pleasure: the bronzes, small classical nudes perfect for the hand, that connoisseurs would keep in the study for learned discussion of the quality of the modelling, or of patination. Or the collections of small enamelled snuff-boxes that, when opened, showed priapic fauns or startled nymphs, little stagings of concealment and revelation. These small things to handle and to be moved around – slightly, playfully, discerningly – were kept in vitrines.

  The chance to pass round a small and shocking object was too good to miss in the Paris of the 1870s. Vitrines had become essential to the witty and flirtatious intermittencies of salon life.

  6. A FOX WITH INLAID EYES, IN WOOD

  And so Charles buys the netsuke. He buys 264.

  A fox with inlaid eyes, in wood

  A curled snake on a lotus leaf, in ivory

  A boxwood hare and the moon

  A standing warrior

  A sleeping servant

  Children playing with masks, in ivory

  Children playing with puppies

  Children playing with a samurai helmet

  Dozens of ivory rats

  Monkeys and tigers and deer and eels and a galloping horse

  Priests and actors and samurai and craftsmen and a bathing woman in her wooden tub

  A bundle of kindling tied with a rope

  A medlar

  A hornet on a hornet’s nest, the nest attached to a broken branch

  Three toads on a leaf

  A monkey and its young

  A couple making love

  A reclining stag scratching his ear with a hind leg

  A Noh dancer in a heavy embroidered robe holding a mask in front of his face

  An octopus

  A naked woman and an octopus

  A naked woman

  Three sweet chestnuts

  A priest on a horse

  A persimmon.

  And over 200 more, a huge collection of very small things.

  Charles bought them, not piece by piece like his lacquers, but as a complete and spectacular collection from Sichel.

  Had they just come in, each one folded in its square of silk, then placed in wood-shavings, then crated from Yokohama on one of those four-month shipments by way of the Cape? Had Sichel recently put them out in a cabinet to tempt his rich collectors, or did Charles unwrap them one by one, finding my favourite tiger turning in surprise on a branch of bamboo, carved in ivory at the end of the eighteenth century in Osaka; or the rats looking up as they are caught on the husk of a dried-out fish?

  Did he fall in love with the startlingly pale hare with amber eyes, and buy the rest for company?

  Did he order them from Sichel? Were they put together over a year or two from the newly impoverished, by some canny dealer in Kyoto, and sold on? I look carefully. There are a very few that have been made for the Western market, knocked up in a hurry ten years before. The plump boy, simpering with his mask, is definitely one of these. It is crudely done, vulgar. The vast majority are netsuke that were carved before the coming of Commodore Perry, some from a hundred years before. There are figures and animals and erotica and creatures from myth: they cover most of the subjects that you could expect in a comprehensive collection. Some are signed by famous carvers. Someone with knowledge has put this group together.

  Did he just happen to be there at Sichel’s with Louise, amongst the landslide of silks, the folders of prints, the screens and the porcelain, before the other collectors could spot the trove? Did she turn to him or did he turn to her?

  Or was Louise elsewhere? And was it intended as a surprise for her when she next came up to his rooms?

  How much did they cost this young man, this capricious, charming collector? His father Léon had just died of heart failure, aged only forty-five, and had been buried next to Betty in the family grave in Montmartre. But Ephrussi et Cie was doing very well indeed. Jules had recently bought the land on the Lake Lucerne for his holiday chalet. His uncles were buying chateaux and running racehorses at Longchamps in the Ephrussi colours of blue-and-yellow polka dots. The netsuke must have been very expensive indeed, but Charles could choose to afford this extravagance as his fortune went on growing year by year with that of his family.

  There are things I cannot know. But I do know that Charles bought a black vitrine to put them in, wood polished like lacquer. It was taller than him, just over six foot high. You could see in through the glass door at the front and through the glass at the sides. A mirror at the back let the netsuke slide away into infinities of collecting. And they were all placed on green velvet. There are many different subtle variations of colours in netsuke, all the colours of the ivory, the horn and the boxwood: cream, wax, nut-brown, gold in this field of dense dark green.

  They are in front of me now, Charles’s collection within a collection.

  Charles places the netsuke on the green velvet in their dark vitrine with the mirrored back, in this, their first resting-place in the story. They are near the lacquer boxes, near the great hangings he brought back from Italy, close to the golden carpet.

  I wonder if he could resist going out onto the landing and turning left to tell his brother Ignace about his new acquisition.

  Netsuke cannot knock around your salon or your study unprotected. They get lost or dropped, dusty, chipped. They need a place to rest, preferably in company with other bibelots. This is why vitrines come to matter. And in this journey towards the netsuke, I became more and more intrigued by vitrines, glass display cases.

  I kept coming across them in Louise’s salon. I had seen them preserved in Belle Époque mansions, read about them in Charles’s exhibition reviews in the Gazette and in descriptions in Rothschild inventories. And now that Charles has one of his own, I realise they are part of the performance of salon life, not just part of the furnishings. A collector friend of Charles is described in the act of placing Japanese objects in a vitrine, ‘like a painter applying a stroke to his canvas. The harmony is complete and the refinement exquisite…’

  The vitrines exist so that you can see objects, but not touch them: they frame things, suspend them, tantalise through distance.

  This is what I realise now I failed to understand about vitrines. I spent the first twenty years of my life as a potter earnestly trying to get objects out of the glass cases in which my pots were often placed in galleries and museums. They die, I’d say, behind glass, held in that airlock. Vitrines were a sort of coffin: things need to be out and to take their chances away from the protection of formal display, to be liberated. ‘Out of the drawing-room and into the kitchen!’ I wrote in a sort of manifesto. There was too much in the way. There was trop de verre, too much glass, as a great architect commented on seeing a rival Modernist’s house of glass.

  But the vitrine – as opposed to the museum’s case – is for opening. And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, and then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric.

  Charles’s friend Cernuschi had a great collection of Japanese art just down the road next to the gates to the parc Monceau, displayed on radical white walls. It made the Japanese objects ‘look unhappy’, as if they were in the Louvre, a critic remarked. Displaying Japanese art as Art made it problematic, over-serious. But Charles’s salon up the hill, a place for a strange encounter between old Italian things and new Japanese things, is not a museum.

  Charles’s vitrine is a threshold.

  And these netsuke are perfect for the life of Charles’s salon. The golden Louise opening up her vitrine of Japanese things, fishing, handing things out to be looked at and handled, to be caressed, shows that Japanese things are made for digressive conversation, made for distraction. These netsuke add something very particular to Charles’s way of living, I think. They are the first things that have any connection to everyday life, even an exotic everyday life. They are wonderful and highly sensual, of course, but they a
re not princely like his Medici bed or his Marie Antoinette lacquers. They are for touching.

  Above all, they make you laugh in many different ways. They are witty and ribald and slyly comic. And now that I have finally got the netsuke up the winding stairs and settled in Charles’s salon in the honey-coloured hotel, I find I am relieved that this man whom everyone liked so much had enough of a sense of humour to enjoy them. I don’t have just to admire him. I can like him too.

  7. THE YELLOW ARMCHAIR

  The netsuke – my tiger, my hare, my persimmon – have settled in Charles’s study where he was finally finishing his book on Dürer. It is a room lit up in a breathless letter to Charles from the young poet Jules Laforgue:

  Every line of your beautiful book recalled so many memories. Especially the hours spent working alone in your room where the note of a yellow armchair bursts out! And the Impressionists! Two fans by Pissarro, solidly constructed of painstaking small strokes. The Sisleys, the Seine and the telegraph wires and the sky in springtime. The barge near Paris, with that loafer in the lanes. And Monet’s flowering apple trees scaling a hill. And Renoir’s dishevelled little savage and Berthe Morisot’s deep and fresh undergrowth, a seated woman, her child, a black dog, a butterfly net. And another Morisot, a maid with her charge – blue, green, pink, white, dappled with the sun. And the other Renoirs, the Parisienne with red lips in a blue jersey. And that carefree woman with a muff and the lacquer rose in her buttonhole…And the bare-shouldered dancer by Mary Cassatt in yellow, green, blond, rust on the red fauteuil. And the nervous dancers by Degas, Duranty by Degas – and of course Manet’s Polichinelle with Banville’s poem!…Ah! The tender hours spent there, losing myself in the catalogue of Albert Dürer, dreaming…in your bright room where bursts the note of the yellow armchair, yellow, so yellow!