The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [15]
This first collection is totally conventional. Many of his parents’ friends would have had similar objects within their houses, and would have brought them together to make set-pieces of decorative sumptuousness, just as the young Charles created his own burgundy-and-gold mise en scène in his Parisian bedroom. It is just a smaller version of what was happening elsewhere in other Jewish households. He is showing, rather emphatically for a young man, how grown-up he is. And he is preparing himself for a life in public.
If you wanted to see set-pieces at scale you could go to any of the Rothschild houses in Paris or, indeed, to James de Rothschild’s new palace at Ferrières, just outside the city. Here the works of the Renaissance Italy of merchants and bankers were celebrated: remember that great patronage comes through the astute use of money and is not hereditary. Rather than having a Great Hall, chivalric and Christian, Ferrières had a central indoor piazza with four great doorways leading to different parts of the house. Under a Tiepolo ceiling there was a gallery of tapestries of the Triumphs, sculptured figures in black-and-white marble, and pictures by Velázquez, Rubens, Guido Reni and Rembrandt. Above all, there was a lot of gold: gold on the furniture, on the picture frames, on the mouldings, in the tapestries, and embedded – everywhere – were gilded symbols of the Rothschilds. Le gout Rothschild had become a shorthand for gilding. Jews and their gold.
Charles’s sensibility stops short of Ferrières. As does his space, of course: he only has his two salons and his bedroom. But Charles not only has a place in which he could arrange his new possessions and his books, but also has a sense of himself as a young scholar-collector. He is in the extraordinary position of being both ridiculously affluent and very self-directed.
And neither of these things warms me to him at all. In fact the bed makes me feel a little queasy: I am not sure how much time I can face with this young man and his good eye for art and interior decoration, netsuke or no. Connoisseur, goes the alarm. And thinks he knows too much, too young.
And, of course, much, much too rich for his own good.
I realise that I must understand how Charles looked at things, and for this I must read his writings. I am in safe academic territory here: I will make a complete bibliography, and I will work my way through it in chronological order. I start by reading old volumes of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts from the time when Charles comes to live in Paris, noting down his first, rather dry published comments on Mannerist painters, bronzes and Holbein. I feel focused, if dutiful. He has a favourite Venetian painter, Jacopo de Barbari, who was keen on St Sebastian, the combat of Tritons and writhing bound nudes. I’m not sure how significant this taste for eroticised subjects will prove. I remember Laocoön and feel a little anxious.
He starts poorly. There are notes on exhibitions, books, essays, and notes on publications: the expected art-historical detritus on the margins of other people’s scholarship (‘notes towards an authentication of’, ‘responses to the catalogue raisonné of’). These texts are a little like his Italian collections and I feel I am making scant headway. But, as the weeks go by, I find myself starting to relax into Charles’s company: this first collector of the netsuke begins to write more fluidly. There are unexpected registers of feeling. Three weeks of my precious spring go by, and then another fortnight, a mad expense of days unspooling in the dimness in Periodicals.
Charles learns to spend time with a picture. He has been and looked, you feel, and then gone back and looked again. There are essays on exhibitions where you feel this touch on the shoulder, that turn to look again, move closer, move further away. You feel his growing confidence and his passion, and then at last the beginning of a steeliness in his writings,