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

269 Pages·2010·2.58 MB·English

by  Edmund de Waal

The Hare with Amber Eyes
A HIDDEN INHERITANCE
Edmund de Waal
Chatto & Windus
LONDON
CONTENTS
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Family Tree
Preface
Part One Paris 1871–1899
Le West End
Un lit de parade
‘A mahout to guide her’
‘So light, so soft to the touch’
A box of children’s sweets
A fox with inlaid eyes, in wood
The yellow armchair
Monsieur Elstir’s asparagus
Even Ephrussi fell for it
My small profits
A ‘very brilliant five o’clock’
Part Two Vienna 1899–1938
Die Potemkinische Stadt
Zionstrasse
History as it happens
‘A large square box such as children draw’
‘Liberty Hall’
The sweet young thing
Once upon a time
Types of the Old City
Heil Wien! Heil Berlin!
Literally zero
You must change your life
Eldorado 5-0050
Part Three Vienna, Kövesces, Tunbridge Wells, Vienna 1938–1947
‘An ideal spot for mass marches’
‘A never-to-be-repeated opportunity’
‘Good for a single journey’
The tears of things
Anna’s pocket
‘All quite openly, publicly and legally’
Part Four Tokyo 1947–2001
Takenoko
Kodachrome
Where did you get them?
The real Japan
On polish
Coda Tokyo, Odessa, London 2001–2009
Jiro
An astrolabe, a menzula, a globe
Yellow/gold/red
Acknowledgements
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781407052472
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Published by Chatto & Windus 2010
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Copyright © Edmund de Waal 2010
Edmund de Waal has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the
publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition,
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All quotations from À la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust are from
the translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, revised by Terence Kilmartin, 1981
We are grateful to the following for permission to use these images: Le Pont de
l’Europe, Gustave Caillebotte © Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva; Une botte
d’asperges, Edouard Manet © Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne; Schottentor,
Vienna, 1885 © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek; Palais Ephrussi frontal
view, plan from the Allgemeine Bauzeitung © Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek; Vienna Anschluss, 1938 © Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek.
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Chatto & Windus Random House, 20
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for Ben, Matthew and Anna
and for my father
THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES
264 wood and ivory carvings none of them larger than a matchbox: potter
Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the
Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the
‘netsuke’, they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined . . .
The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain
exporters in the world; in the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi was part of a wealthy new
generation settling in Paris. Marcel Proust was briefly his secretary and used
Charles as the model for the aesthete Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.
Charles’s passion was collecting, and the netsuke, bought when Japanese objets
were all the rage in the salons, were sent as a wedding present to his banker
cousin in Vienna.
Later, three children – including a young Ignace – played with the
collection as history reverberated around them. The Anschluss and Second
World War swept the Ephrussis to the brink of oblivion. Almost all that remained
of their vast empire was the netsuke collection, smuggled out of the huge
Viennese palace (then occupied by Hitler’s theorist on the ‘Jewish Question’),
one piece at a time, in the pocket of a loyal maid – and hidden in a straw
mattress.
In this stunningly original memoir, Edmund de Waal travels the world to
stand in the great buildings his forebears once inhabited. He traces the network
of a remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. And, in
prose as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves, he tells the story of a
unique collection which passed from hand to hand – and which, in a twist of
fate, found its way home to Japan.
‘Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been
attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn’t
grasp . . . Well, now that I’m a little too weary to live with other people, these
old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to me – it’s
the mania of all collectors – very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort
of vitrine, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the world can
know nothing. And of this collection to which I’m now much more attached than
to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his books, but in fact
without the least distress, that it will be very tiresome to have to leave it all.’