The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [24]
Japanese things carried an air of eroticised possibility, not simply the shared encounter of lovers over a lacquer box or ivory bibelots. Japanese fans, bibelots and robes would only come alive in private encounters. They were props for dressing up, role-playing, the sensuous reimagining of the self. Of course they appealed to Charles with his ducal bed, canopied with swags of brocade, and his endless reconfiguring of his rooms in the rue de Monceau.
In James Tissot’s La Japonaise au bain a girl is naked but for a heavy brocade kimono, loose on her shoulders, standing on the threshold of a Japanese room. In Monet’s provocative portrait of his wife Camille, she is shown in a golden wig, clothed in a swirling robe of embroidered red on which a samurai unsheathes his sword. Behind her is a scattering of fans across the wall and the floor, like a burst of Whistler’s fireworks. It is very much a performance for the artist, one akin to that in Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann of the demi-mondaine Odette receiving Swann, dressed in her kimono in her drawing-room of Japanese silk cushions and screens and lanterns, filled with its heavy scent of chrysanthemums, an olfactory Japonisme.
Ownership seemed transposed. These objects seemed to induce insatiability, to own you, make demands on you. Collectors themselves speak of the intoxication of hunting and buying, a process that could send you towards mania: ‘Of all the passions, of all without exception, the passion for the bibelot is perhaps the most terrible and invincible. The man smitten by an antique is a lost man. The bibelot is not only a passion, it is a mania,’ claimed the young writer Guy de Maupassant.
A haunting self-description of this comes in a strange book written by Charles’s scourge, Edmond de Goncourt. In La Maison d’un artiste de Goncourt describes each room of his own house in Paris in painstaking detail – the boiseries, the pictures, the books, the objects – in an attempt to evoke each object and picture and their placement as an act of homage to his dead brother, with whom he had lived. In two volumes, each of more than 300 pages, de Goncourt constructs an autobiography and a travelogue, as much as an exhaustive inventory of a house through objects. Japanese art saturates the house. There are Japanese brocades and kakemonos, scrolls, in the hall. Even the garden is a carefully curated assortment of Chinese and Japanese trees and shrubs.
In a moment worthy of Borges, his collection even incorporates a grouping of Chinese art put together by a seventeenth-century Japanese ‘bibeloteur exotique’. There is endless play in de Goncourt’s display between pictures, screens, scrolls on open display and those objects held in vitrines.
I imagine de Goncourt, dark-eyed, an unruly white silk scarf knotted under his chin, pausing for effect at the door of his pear-wood vitrine. He is holding one of his netsuke, and he starts to tell a story of the obsessive search for perfection that lies behind each object:
a whole class of exceptionally fine artists – usually specialists – are responsible for . . . fabrication and dedicate themselves exclusively to the reproduction of an object or a creature. Thus, we hear of an artist whose family has for three generations sculpted rats in Japan, nothing but rats. Alongside these professional artists, amid this manually gifted populace, there would be amateur netsuke sculptors, who amuse themselves by sculpting a little masterpiece for themselves. One day, Mr Philippe Sichel approached a Japanese man sitting on his threshold, notching a netsuke that was in its last stages of completion. Mr Sichel asked him if he would like to sell it . . . when it was completed. The Japanese man started laughing, and ended up telling him that that would take approximately a further eighteen months; then he showed him another netsuke that was attached to his belt,