![]() ![]() This struggle manifested as rebellion in some of the children for example, Emmy’s eldest daughter went on to dislike the world of fashion and elite society. The Ephrussi family, meanwhile, rode on the tailwind of their former glory in nineteenth-century Europe, struggling to adapt their identity to the changes happening in contemporary European life. Viktor allowed his children to play with the netsuke when they wanted toys to pass the time as their mother, a baroness named Emmy, tried on dresses for various balls. In his research, de Waal learns that Charles sent the carvings to Vienna, Italy, where they went to his cousin Viktor as a wedding gift. The writer Marcel Proust, too, observed Charles closely, using him as a model for the aesthetician character Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. He supported the Impressionist movement before it was popular at the turn of the twentieth century, and even appears in a painting by Renoir called Luncheon of the Boating Party. ![]() De Waal discovers that Charles was the friend, patron, and subject of many artists. De Waal articulates the personal background of Charles: having rejected the space made for him in the family banking business, he left to study art and determine his own life course guided by aesthetics and other more globalist aspects of intellectual life. Reflecting Eastern imagery, such as drunken monks, plums that look as if they are at the idyllic and precarious onset of ripeness, prowling tigers, and a hare with amber eyes from which the memoir takes its name, De Waal says that Charles Ephrussi collected them at the height of the popularity of Japanese art in Paris, whose elite coveted these relics, driving up their value. De Waal provides vivid descriptions of the items making up the netsuke collection. Totaling 264 carvings made of wood and ivory, they were maintained up until de Waal, the fifth generation of the family, inherited them. What remained was their netsuke collection. By the end of World War II, most of their estate had been sold off throughout the world, rendering their various artifacts impossible to trace. The reign of the Ephrussis was brief, owing to the quick rise and decline of their banking empire. De Waal begins with a description of the netsuke collection’s previous owners, the Ephrussis, an extremely wealthy Jewish banking family, often identified as similar to the Rothschilds, who lived in Paris and Vienna in the nineteenth century. The book is a meditation on the elegant narrative threads that connect art, history, and family, persisting across large spans of time. In doing so, he also traces the evolution of his own lineage and the various fissures induced by crises of identity and war. A fifth-generation inheritor of a collection of tiny but invaluable wood and ivory carvings called netsuke that originated in the dynasties of pre-modern Japan, he tracks the movement of his collection through time from nineteenth-century Europe to his present day in 2009. The Hare with Amber Eyes is a 2010 family memoir written by Edmund de Waal. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |