Amber eyes5/31/2023 ![]() I love art, but my eyes started to glaze over by the umpteenth depiction of a stately salon filled to bursting with brocade, porcelain, and ivory. That said, the pacing is often glacial, and the book only begins to pick up about mid-way through, with the author's discussion of how the Nazis' rise to power directly affected his family and their art treasures. The author is clearly passionate about the subjects he discusses, and his dedication to researching his family's history, in all its triumph and tragedy, is admirable. ![]() On the plus side, it contains some fascinating information on the restitution of art objects that had been confiscated by the Third Reich as well as the Allied rebuilding of Japan after World War II. I finished The Hare With The Amber Eyes with ambivalence. Sweeping yet intimate, it is a highly original meditation on art, history, and family, as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves. In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal unfolds the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century. Years after the war, she would find a way to return them to the family shed served even in their exile. But the netsuke were smuggled away by a loyal maid, Anna, and hidden in her straw mattress. A library of priceless books and a collection of Old Master paintings were confiscated by the Nazis. Ephrussi and his cosmopolitan family were imprisoned or scattered, and Hitlers theorist on the Jewish question appropriated their magnificent palace on the Ringstrasse. The Anschluss changed their world beyond recognition. Longing to write, she struck up a correspondence with Rilke, who encouraged her in her poetry. Her older daughter grew up to disdain fashionable society. Marcel Proust studied Charles closely enough to use him as a model for the aesthete and lover Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.Ĭharles gave the carvings as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor in Vienna his children were allowed to play with one netsuke each while they watched their mother, the Baroness Emmy, dress for ball after ball. An early supporter of the Impressionists, he appears, oddly formal in a top hat, in Renoirs Luncheon of the Boating Party. Charles had shunned the place set aside for him in the family business to make a study of art, and of beautiful living. The netsukedrunken monks, almost-ripe plums, snarling tigerswere gathered by Charles Ephrussi at the height of the Parisian rage for all things Japanese. Entranced by their beauty and mystery, he determined to trace the story of his family through the story of the collection. The renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal became the fifth generation to inherit this small and exquisite collection of netsuke. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox. The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who "burned like a comet" in nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna society.
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