But, first 24 hours of flying, stopping in Jeddah in the middle of the night.
So I immersed myself in my bookand read the un-put-downable "Hare with the amber eyes" by Edmund de Waal.
How to say it in a nutshell - quite impossible I think, but I’ll try.
The story of the netsuke begins in Paris at the height of Japonisme, amidst the whirl of Impressionism. Edmund’s great-great uncle Charles Ephrussi, a member of a wealthy Jewish banking family (Rothschild-kind-of wealthy) was a discerning art connoisseur and collector. He commissioned Manet and Renoir, owned Monets and was a friend of Proust. Charles Ephrussi also had a collection of 264 netsuke which Edmund inherited in 1994. We follow the history of the netsuke as the story of the Ephrussi family unfolds, from Paris to Vienna and into the holocaust. Somehow, the collection survives intact and Edmund first sees them in Japan when they are owned by his great uncle, Ignace Ephrussi.
Edmunds is erudite and the story is beautifully told, even though at times it must have been heart rending for him as he details the pain in his two-year search. I felt as though I was beside him, as he slipped one of the netsuke into his pocket and spent hours in the archives, or stood in Ringstrasse, Vienna looking at the building that was once the Paleis Ephrussi.
In an article de Waal wrote in the Saturday Guardian 29.05.10, he explains more about his collection: “I have 264 netsuke: street vendors, beggars and monks, rat catchers, dogs, lovers, a woman and an octopus, an elderly lady on an elderly horse, a witch trapped in a temple bell, a persimmon about to split, a hare with amber eyes. It is a very big collection of very small objects. I pick one up and turn it round in my fingers, weigh it in the palm of my hand. If it is wood, chestnut or elm, it is even lighter than the ivory. You see the patina more easily on these wooden ones; there is a faint shine on the spine of the brindled wolf and on the tumbling acrobats locked in their embrace. The ivory ones come in shades of cream, every colour, in fact but white. A few have inlaid eyes of amber or horn. Some of the older ones are slightly worn away: the haunch of the faun resting on leaves has lost its markings. There is a slight split, an almost imperceptible fault line on the cicada. Who dropped it? Where and when?”
http://www.edmunddewaal.com
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