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

by Edmund de Waal

  Albert Dürer et ses dessins was Charles’s first proper book, a book that had taken him ‘vagabonding’ across Europe. Laforgue, twenty-one years old and new to Paris, had been recommended as a secretary to sift the lists, emendations, notes of ten years of study into appendices, tables and indices for publication. For Laforgue, Charles in his Chinese dressing-gown was an intoxicating patron in an intoxicating setting.

  I’m pretty excited too, because I had no idea that Laforgue had worked for him, before coming across a footnote in a book on Manet. Laforgue is a wonderful poet of cities, park benches dripping wet, telegraph wires on roads that no one passes.

  Charles is no longer the rushing young man. He has become the ‘Benedictine-dandy of the rue de Monceau’, a black-coated scholar, but flaneurial, whose top hat is tilted at an angle; someone who carries his cane under his arm with a sense of correctness and amour propre. Someone who has a valet to make sure that his hat is brushed. Someone, I am sure, who never carried things in his jacket pockets and spoilt the fall of the cloth. We see him here at thirty, with his mistress and his new role as the recently appointed editor of the Gazette, and find that he has grown into himself. He is a mondain art historian with a secretary. And a collector now not only of netsuke, but of pictures.

  And he is so alive in this room. These colours – the black of his coat, and the black of his top hat, and the slightly reddish tinge to his beard – against the stream of fantastic paintings, set alight by this fierce clarity of the note of the yellow armchair. A study, you think, of a man who not only needs colour, but constructs his life around it. A man who wears the perfect uniform of rabbinical black in the rue de Monceau, and who has this other life behind this study door.

  What kind of study could possibly go on in a room like this?

  Jules Laforgue started work for Charles on 14th July 1881. He worked all summer in this study, staying up half the night. He was, I note with some severity, very badly paid by this Jewish Maecenas. It is through his eyes that we see Charles completing his book: ‘stone by stone you slowly and solidly build the pyramid which supports your beautifully bearded monument’. In a throwaway bit of marginalia Laforgue scribbles a picture of the two of them together. Laforgue, tiny with bouffant hair, walks in front, arms and legs akimbo blowing clouds of smoke, while the debonair, upright, tall, monumental, Assyrian-profiled Charles walks behind him. He has filled out splendidly.

  Laforgue adores him, teases him. He is anxious to prove himself in this his first job. ‘And now, oh dandy-scholar of the Rue de Monceau, what are you up to? I always see the summaries of the Gazette and Art. What are you plotting between Monet’s Grenouillère, Manet’s Constantin Guys, and the…strange archaeologies of Moreau – tell me.’

  The ‘Benedictine-dandy of the rue de Monceau’: a self-portrait with Charles, by Jules Laforgue, 1881

  Laforgue wishes to be remembered to ‘our’ room, signs off with ‘good wishes to the Monet – you know which’. His summer with Charles was an encounter with Impressionism, an encounter that would challenge him to find a new kind of poetic language. He tries out a kind of prose-poem, calls it ‘Guitare’, and dedicates it to Charles. But surely these descriptions of Charles’s study are prose-poems themselves: there are the mixtures of the exact markings of colour – ‘la tâche colorée’ – the yellow armchair, the red lips and blue jersey of Renoir’s girl. The letters, pell-mell with sensation, high on ideas, are close to Laforgue’s description of Impressionist style as one in which spectator and spectacle are knitted together: ‘irrémédiablement mouvants, insaisissables et insaissants’.

  Charles was very attached to Laforgue. After the long summer in Paris he arranged for the young poet to get a job in Berlin as reader of French to the Empress – Charles had a casually impressive social reach – and wrote to him, sent him money, advised him, critiqued his reviews and then helped Laforgue to get published. Charles kept more than thirty letters from Laforgue from this time, publishing them in the journal La revue blanche after the poet’s early death from tuberculosis.

  In these letters you feel the room. I wanted to be here with the netsuke, and have worried that I would never get beyond a connoisseurial inventory of the grand furnishings of Charles’s apartment. I’ve worried how I could construct a life entirely through objects. The room overflows, like Laforgue’s writings, with unexpected conjunctions and disjunctions. I can hear their digressive night-time conversations and am here at last.

  Everything in this salon is heightened emotion. It is difficult not to feel alive in a place saturated with images of freedom and lassitude, days out in the countryside, young women, a gypsy girl, bathers in the Seine, a loafer in a lane with nowhere to go, a gorgeous faun framed amongst the broderies and all those curious, funny, tactile netsuke.

  8. MONSIEUR ELSTIR’S ASPARAGUS

  I am in the library again, hesitating. Dürer’s self-portrait – Christ-like, long-haired and bearded – stares back at me as I open Charles’s Albert Dürer et ses dessins. There is a challenge in this stare. I have spent ages thinking about how this careful, delicate skein of thinking, and all these properly edited tables and lists, could have been written in a study with Monet’s breezy summer day there on the wall.

  When I read of Charles’s animation as he describes his search for Dürer’s lost drawings, I can hear the catch of his voice: ‘We traced the drawings of our master wherever we suspected they might be hidden: museums of capital cities and secondary towns abroad, of Paris and the provinces, famous collections and little-known private ones, the cabinets of amateurs and of forbidding people, we rummaged and raked up, we examined everything.’ Charles might be a flâneur, might take his time in the salons, be seen at the races and the Opéra, but his ‘vagabonding’ is done with real intensity.

  Vagabonding was his word. It sounds recreational rather than diligent or professional. As an extremely rich Jewish mondain, it would have been contrary to social practice to be seen to work. He was an ‘amateur d’art’, an art lover, and his phrase is carefully self-deprecating. But it does get the pleasure of the searching right, the way you lose your sense of time when you are researching, are pulled on by whims as much as by intent. It makes me think of the rummaging that I am doing through his life as I track the netsuke, the noting of other people’s annotations in the margins. I vagabond in libraries, trace where he went and why. I follow the leads of whom he knew, whom he wrote about, whose pictures he bought. In Paris I go and stand outside his old offices in the rue Favart in the summer rain like some sad art-historical gumshoe and wait to see who comes out.

  I find that as the months pass I have a strangely increased sensitivity to the quality of paper.

  And I find that I have fallen for Charles. He is a passionate scholar. He is well dressed and good at art history and dogged in research. What a great and unlikely trinity of attributes to have, I think, aspirationally.

  Charles had a very particular reason to do his research work. He believed that ‘all of Dürer’s drawings, even the lightest of sketches, merited a special mention, that nothing that was attributed to the hand of our master should be omitted…’ Charles knows that it is intimacy that matters. Picking up a drawing enables us to ‘catch the thought of the artist in all its freshness, at the very moment of manifestation, with perhaps even more truth and sincerity than in the works that require arduous hours of labour, with the defiant patience of the genius’.

  This is a wonderful manifesto for drawing. It celebrates the moment of apprehension and the fugitive moment of response – a few traces of ink or a few strokes of the pencil. It is also a beautifully coded claim for a conversation between a particular kind of the old and the very new in art. Charles intended this book to ‘make better known in France the greatest German artist’, the first artist he fell in love with during his childhood in Vienna. But it also gave Charles an emotional as well as an intellectual platform from which to argue that different ages informed each other, that a sketch by Dürer could
talk to a sketch by Degas. He knew that it could work.

  Charles was becoming an advocate in print for the living artists he was getting to know. He was a critic both in his own name and under pseudonyms, arguing the merits of particular paintings, fighting for the cause of Degas’s Little Dancer, ‘standing in her working clothes, tired and worn out…’ Now, as editor of the Gazette, he started to commission reviews of the exhibitions of painters he admired. And, passionate and partisan, he had also started buying pictures for the room with the yellow armchair.

  Charles’s first pictures were by Berthe Morisot. He loved her work: ‘She grinds flower petals onto her palette, in order to spread them later on her canvas with airy, witty touches, thrown down a little haphazardly. These harmonise, blend, and finish by producing something vital, fine and charming that you do not so much see as intuit…one step further and it will be impossible to distinguish or understand anything at all!’

  In three years he put together a collection of forty Impressionist works – and bought twenty more for his Bernstein cousins in Berlin. He bought paintings and pastels by Morisot, Cassatt, Degas, Manet, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro and Renoir: Charles created one of the great early collections of the Impressionists. All the walls of his rooms must have been filled with these pictures, they must have been hung above each other three deep. Forget the Degas pastel glowing solitary on a gallery wall at the Metropolitan, five feet from another picture on either side, nothing above or below. In this room this pastel (Two Women at the Haberdashers, 1880) must have shaded the Donatello, knocked against a score of other glowing pictures, rubbed up against the vitrine of netsuke.

  Charles was in the vanguard. He needed audacity. The Impressionists had their passionate supporters, but were still assailed in the press and by the Academy as charlatans. His advocacy was significant; he had the gravitas of a prominent critic and editor. He also had straightforward utility as a patron for painters who were struggling: it was ‘in the mansion of an American or of a young Israelite banker’ that you would find these paintings, wrote Philippe Burty. And Charles acted as a mahout to other wealthy friends, persuading Madame Straus, giver of the fiercely aesthetic salon, to purchase one of Monet’s Nymphéas.

  But he was much more than this. He was a real interlocutor, a visitor to their studios to see work in progress, to buy a picture from the easel, ‘an older brother to young artists’, as one critic wrote. He and Renoir talked at length about which paintings might be best to send to the Salon, Whistler asked him to check one of his pictures for damage. ‘It was due to him,’ wrote Proust in a later character sketch of Charles as ‘un amateur de peinture’, ‘that many paintings, which had been left at a half-way stage, were actually completed.’

  And he was a friend of the artists. ‘It is now Thursday,’ writes Manet to Charles, ‘and I still haven’t heard from you. You are evidently enthralled by your host’s wit…Come on, take up your very best pen and get on with it.’

  Charles bought a picture of some asparagus from Manet, one of his extraordinary small still lifes, where a lemon or rose is lambent in the dark. It was a bundle of twenty stalks bound in straw. Manet wanted 800 francs for it, a substantial sum, and Charles, thrilled, sent 1,000. A week later Charles received a small canvas signed with a simple M in return. It was a single asparagus stalk laid across a table with an accompanying note: ‘This seems to have slipped from the bundle.’

  Proust, who knew Charles’s paintings well from visits to his apartment, retells the story to his credit. In his novels there is an Impressionist painter, Elstir, modelled partly on Whistler and partly on Renoir. The Duke de Guermantes fumes that ‘There was nothing else in the picture. A bundle of asparagus exactly like what you’re eating now. But I must say I declined to swallow Monsieur Elstir’s asparagus. He asked three hundred francs for a bundle of asparagus. A Louis, that’s as much as they’re worth, even if they are out of season. I thought it a bit stiff.’

  Edouard Manet, Une botte d’asperges , 1880

  Many of the pictures on the walls of Charles’s working study were of his friends. There was a pastel by Degas of Edmond Duranty, captured in a description by the young writer J. K. Huysmans: ‘Here is Monsieur Duranty, among his prints and his books, sitting at a desk. And his neighbouring tapering fingers, his sharp mocking eyes, his acute searching expression, his wry smile of an English humorist…’ There was a canvas by Constantin Guys, the ‘painter of modern life’, as well as a portrait of him by Manet, looking very unkempt and bushy and slightly wild-eyed. From Degas, Charles bought the double portrait of General Mellinet and the Chief Rabbi Astruc, in which the heads of these two redoubtable men – friends from their shared experiences of the war of 1870 – are seen in half-profile together.

  Then there were Charles’s pictures of his Paris life: a scene by Degas of the start of the races at Longchamp, where Charles would go to see his uncle Maurice Ephrussi’s famous racehorses. ‘Courses – Ephrussi – 1000 [francs],’ writes Degas in his notebook. And images of the demi-monde, of dancers and a scene at the milliner’s with the backs of the heads of two young women on a sofa (2,000 francs), and one of a solitary woman in a café nursing a glass of absinthe.

  Most of Charles’s pictures were of the country, of the fast-moving clouds and wind in the trees that spoke to his feeling for the disappearing moment. There were five landscapes by Sisley and three by Pissarro. From Monet he purchased, for 400 francs, a view of Vétheuil with scudding white clouds across a field with willows, and a picture of apple trees, Pommiers, painted in the same village. He also bought a scene of a wintry early morning on the Seine, Les glaçons, with the break-up of the ice, a painting beautifully described by Proust in his early novel Jean Santeuil as ‘a day of thaw…the sun, the blue of the sky, the broken ice, the mud, and the moving water turning the river to a dazzling mirror’.

  Even the portrait of the ‘dishevelled little savage’ to whom Laforgue asked to be remembered captures this feeling of impermanence, of imminent change. La Bohémienne, the red-headed gypsy girl with her unkempt hair, is in country clothes standing amongst grasses and trees in fierce sunlight. She is clearly part of her landscape, about to run off and keep running.

  These were all paintings, Charles wrote, that could ‘present the living being, in gesture and attitude, moving in the fugitive, ever-changing atmosphere and light; to seize in passing the perpetual mobility of the colour of the air, deliberately ignoring individual shades in order to achieve a luminous unity whose separate elements melt together into an indivisible whole and to arrive at a general harmony even by way of discords’.

  He also bought a spectacular painting by Monet of bathers, Les bains de la Grenouillère.

  Back in London, on my way to the library, I go into the National Gallery to see this picture and reimagine it near the yellow fauteuil and the netsuke. It shows a popular place on the Seine in midsummer. Figures in bathing costumes walk along a narrow wooden gangway out into the sun-dappled water, while the non-bathers in their dresses walk towards the shore, a single patch of vermilion on the hem of a dress. Rowing boats – Laforgues’s ‘gloriously imagined boats’ – jumble up into the foreground, a canopy of trees hangs over the scene. The water ripples away, becoming enmeshed with the bobbing heads of the bathers, the ‘perpetual mobility of the colour of the air’. It is only just warm enough to go in the water, you think, almost too cold to come out. You feel alive looking at it.

  This conjunction of Japanese objects and the shimmering new style of painting seems right: though japonisme might be a ‘sort of religion’ to the Ephrussi, it was in Charles’s circle of artist friends that this new art had the most profound effect. Manet, Renoir and Degas were, like him, avid collectors of Japanese prints. The structure of Japanese pictures seemed to rehearse the meaning of the world differently. Inconsequential gobbets of reality – a pedlar scratching his head, a woman with a crying child, a dog wandering off to the left – each had as much significance as a great mountain on the ho
rizon. As in the netsuke, everyday life went on without rehearsal. This almost violent conjunction of story-telling with graphic, calligraphic clarity was catalytic.

  The Impressionists learnt how to cut life up into glances and interjections. Rather than formal views, you have a trapeze-wire dissecting a picture, the backs of the heads at the milliner’s, the pillars of the Bourse. Edmond Duranty, whose portrait in pastels by Degas hung in Charles’s study, saw this happening. ‘The person…is never in the centre of the canvas, in the centre of the setting. He is not always seen as a whole: sometimes he appears cut-off at mid-leg, half-length, or longitudinally.’ When you see the strange portrait by Degas of Viscount Lepic and His Daughters: Place de la Concorde, now in the Hermitage in St Petersburg – three figures and a dog moving across a strange emptiness stretching through the canvas – the influence of the flat perspective of Japanese prints seems palpable.

  Like the repeated themes in the netsuke, Japanese prints also give the possibility of the series – forty-seven views of a famous mountain suggested a way of returning in differing ways and reinterpreting formal pictorial elements. Haystacks, the bend of the river, poplars, the cliff face of Rouen Cathedral – all share this poetic return. Whistler, the master of ‘variations’ and ‘caprices’, explained that ‘On any given canvas the colours must, so to speak, be embroidered on; that is, the same colour must reappear at intervals, like a single thread in an embroidery.’ Zola, an early advocate, wrote of Manet’s paintings that ‘This art of simplification is to be likened to that of Japanese prints; they resemble it in their strange elegance and magnificent patches of colour.’ Simplification seemed to lie at the heart of this new aesthetic, but only if it was combined with ‘patchiness’, with an abstraction of colour or with its repetition.