The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [32]
These were all paintings, Charles wrote, that could ‘present the living being, in gesture and attitude, moving in the fugitive, ever-changing atmosphere and light; to seize in passing the perpetual mobility of the colour of the air, deliberately ignoring individual shades in order to achieve a luminous unity whose separate elements melt together into an indivisible whole and to arrive at a general harmony even by way of discords’.
He also bought a spectacular painting by Monet of bathers, Les Bains de la Grenouillère.
Back in London, on my way to the library, I go into the National Gallery to see this picture and reimagine it near the yellow fauteuil and the netsuke. It shows a popular place on the Seine in midsummer. Figures in bathing costumes walk along a narrow wooden gangway out into the sun-dappled water, while the non-bathers in their dresses walk towards the shore, a single patch of vermilion on the hem of a dress. Rowing boats – Laforgues’s ‘gloriously imagined boats’ – jumble up into the foreground, a canopy of trees hangs over the scene. The water ripples away, becoming enmeshed with the bobbing heads of the bathers, the ‘perpetual mobility of the colour of the air’. It is only just warm enough to go in the water, you think, almost too cold to come out. You feel alive looking at it.
This conjunction of Japanese objects and the shimmering new style of painting seems right: though Japonisme might be a ‘sort of religion’ to the Ephrussi, it was in Charles’s circle of artist friends that this new art had the most profound effect. Manet, Renoir and Degas were, like him, avid collectors of Japanese prints. The structure of Japanese pictures seemed to rehearse the meaning of the world differently. Inconsequential gobbets of reality – a pedlar scratching his head, a woman with a crying child, a dog wandering off to the left – each had as much significance as a great mountain on the horizon. As in the netsuke, everyday life went on without rehearsal. This almost violent conjunction of storytelling with graphic, calligraphic clarity was catalytic.
The Impressionists learnt how to cut life up into glances and interjections. Rather than formal views, you have a trapeze-wire dissecting a picture, the backs of the heads at the milliner’s, the pillars of the Bourse. Edmond Duranty, whose portrait in pastels by Degas hung in Charles’s study, saw this happening. ‘The person . . . is never in the centre of the canvas, in the centre of the setting. He is not always seen as a whole: sometimes he appears cut-off at mid-leg, half-length, or longitudinally.’ When you see the strange portrait by Degas of Viscount Lepic and His Daughters: Place de la Concorde, now in the Hermitage in St Petersburg – three figures and a dog moving across a strange emptiness stretching through the canvas – the influence of the flat perspective of Japanese prints seems palpable.
Like the repeated themes in the netsuke, Japanese prints also give the possibility of the series – forty-seven views of a famous mountain suggested a way of returning in differing ways and reinterpreting formal pictorial elements. Haystacks, the bend of the river, poplars, the cliff face of Rouen Cathedral – all share this poetic return. Whistler, the master of ‘variations’ and ‘caprices’, explained that ‘On any given canvas the colours must, so to speak, be embroidered on; that is, the same colour must reappear at intervals, like a single thread in an embroidery.’ Zola, an early advocate, wrote of Manet’s paintings that ‘This art of simplification is to be likened to that of Japanese prints; they resemble it in their strange elegance and magnificent patches of colour.’ Simplification seemed to lie at the heart of this new aesthetic, but only if it was combined with ‘patchiness’, with an abstraction of colour or with its repetition.
Sometimes all it took was to paint Parisian life in the rain. A flotilla of patchy grey umbrellas taking the place of parasols turns Paris into a kind of Edo.
When Charles writes – beautifully