The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [21]
In the Parisian artistic hothouse it mattered when you started your collection. Earlier collectors, Japonistes, had the edge as they were men of superior appreciation and creators of taste. De Goncourt, naturally, managed to suggest that he and his brother had actually seen Japanese prints before the opening up of Japan. These early adopters of Japanese art, though fiercely competitive with each other, shared their discernment. But, as George Augustus Sala wrote in Paris Herself Again in 1878, the collegiate atmosphere of earlier collecting soon disappeared. ‘Japonisme has become to some very artistic amateurs, the Ephrussi, the Camondos, like a sort of religion.’
Charles and Louise were ‘neo-Japonistes’, young and rich artistic latecomers. For with Japanese art there was an exhilarating lack of connoisseurship, none of the enmeshed knowledge of art historians to confound your immediate responses, your intuitions. Here was a new Renaissance unfolding and the chance to have the ancient and serious art of the East in your hands. You could have it in quantity and you could have it now. Or you could buy it now and make love later.
When you held a Japanese objet, it revealed itself. Touch tells you what you need to know: it tells you about yourself. Edmond de Goncourt offered his view: ‘here, in respect to politeness, gentleness, unctuousness so to speak, of perfect things in one’s hands: an aphorism. Touch – it is the mark by which the amateur recognises himself. The man who handles an object with indifferent fingers, with clumsy fingers, with fingers that do not envelop lovingly is a man who is not passionate about art.’
For these early collectors and travellers to Japan, it was enough to pick up a Japanese object to know whether it was ‘right’ or not. Indeed, the American artist John La Farge on his trip in 1884 made a pact with his friends ‘that we should bring no books, read no books, but come as innocently as we could’. Having a feel for beauty was enough: touch was a kind of sensory innocence.
Japanese art was a brave new world: it introduced new textures, new ways of feeling things. Though there were all those albums of wood block prints to buy, this was not art simply to hang on walls. This was an epiphany of new materials: bronzes of a depth of patina that seemed far greater than those of the Renaissance; lacquers of an unequalled depth and darkness; folding screens of gold leaf to bisect a room, throw light. Monet painted Mme Monet in a Japanese Dress (La Japonaise); Camille Monet’s robe had ‘certain gold embroideries several centimetres thick’. And there were objects that were unlike anything seen in Western art, objects that could only be described as ‘playthings’, small carvings of animals and beggars called ‘netsuke’ that you could roll in your hands. Charles’s friend and editor of the Gazette, the collector Louis Gonse, described a particular boxwood netsuke beautifully as ‘plus gras, plus simple, plus caresse’ – very rich, very simple, very tactile. It is difficult to beat this cadence of response.
This was all stuff to have in your hands, stuff to add texture to your salon or your boudoir. As I look at the images of Japanese things, I see that the Parisians are layering one material on another: an ivory is wrapped in a silk, a silk is hanging behind a lacquer table, a lacquer table is spread with porcelain, fans fall across a floor.
Passionate touch, discovery in the hands, things enveloped lovingly, plus caresse. Japonisme and touch were a seductive combination for Charles and Louise, amongst many others.
Before the netsuke comes a collection of thirty-three black-and-gold lacquer boxes. It was a collection to place with Charles’s other collections in his apartment at the Hôtel Ephrussi, something to sit near his burgundy Renaissance hangings and his pale Donatello sculpture in marble. Charles and Louise put this collection together from Sichel’s chaotic house of treasures. It was a stellar group of seventeenth-century lacquers,