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By Root 1322 0

with Renoir and Degas. It is not just the vertiginous descent from doing the commissioning to being commissioned. Or, indeed, from having paintings to writing about them. It is that I have been working long enough as a potter to know that being commissioned is an extremely delicate business. You are grateful, of course, but gratitude is different from feeling indebted. It is an interesting question for any artist: how long must you go on feeling grateful once someone has bought your work? It must have been especially complex given the youth of this patron – thirty-one in 1881 – and the age of some of the artists: Manet was forty-eight when he painted that bundle of asparagus. And, I think when I look at an image of a Pissarro that Charles owned, of poplar trees in a breeze, it must be especially delicate if your artistic credo is of freedom of expression, and spontaneity and lack of compromise.

Renoir was in need of money, and so Charles persuaded an aunt to sit for him; then he began work on Louise. It took a long summer of delicate negotiation between the lovers and the painter; Fanny, writing from the Chalet Ephrussi where Charles was staying, details the lengths to which he went to make sure it all came off successfully. It was quite a labour to bring about these two paintings. The first is of Louise’s elder daughter Irene, with reddish-golden hair, like her mother’s, falling around her shoulders. The second, impossibly saccharine portrait is of the younger girls, Alice and Elisabeth. The two girls also have their mother’s hair. They stand in front of a dark burgundy curtain, held open to reveal the salon beyond, holding hands, as if for reassurance – a confection of pink-and-blue ruffles and ribbons. Both pictures were exhibited at the Salon of 1881. I’m not sure how much Louise liked them. After all this work she was shockingly late in paying the modest charge of 1,500 francs. I find myself similarly embarrassed when I discover a cross note from Degas reminding Charles about a bill.

All this commissioned work for Renoir made some of Charles’s other painter friends mistrustful. Degas was especially severe: ‘Monsieur Renoir, you have no integrity. It is unacceptable that you paint to order. I gather that you now work for financiers, that you do the rounds with Monsieur Charles Ephrussi, next you’ll be exhibiting at the Mirlitons with Monsieur Bouguereau!’ This anxiety was compounded when Charles started buying pictures by other artists; this patron seemed to be moving on, looking for new sensations. And it was at this point that Charles’s Jewishness made him suspect.

Charles had bought two paintings by Gustave Moreau. De Goncourt described his work as the ‘watercolours of a poet goldsmith, which seem to have been washed with the gleams and patina of the treasures in the Thousand and One Nights’. They were rich, highly symbolic, Parnassian paintings of Salome, Hercules, Sappho, Prometheus. Moreau’s subjects are barely clothed, except for a fall of gauze. The landscapes are classical, full of ruined temples, the details exactingly coded. It was all a very, very long way from a meadow in the wind, the currents of a river amongst ice, or a seamstress bent over her work.

Huysmans would write his scandalous novel À rebours (Against the Grain) about what it felt like to live with a Moreau painting. Or, to be more exact, in the atmosphere created by a Moreau painting. His hero, Des Esseintes, was based closely on the decadent Comte Robert de Montesquiou, a man dedicated to achieving a totally aestheticised existence, finessing the details of his house so that every sensory experience would immerse him totally. The apogee was a tortoise whose shell was encrusted with gemstones so that its slow passage across a room would enliven the pattern of a Persian carpet. This impressed Oscar Wilde, who noted in French in his Paris journal that ‘a friend of Ephrussi has an emerald-encrusted tortoise. I also need emeralds, living bibelots . . .’ This was substantially better than opening the door of a vitrine.

In Des Esseintes’s attenuated