The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [35]
And this is close to how Charles felt about his two great pictures. He wrote to Moreau that his work had ‘the tonalities of an ideal dream’ – an ideal dream being one where you are held in a state of weightless reverie and lose the boundaries of your self.
And Renoir was absolutely furious. ‘Ah that Gustave Moreau, to think he is taken seriously, a painter who has never even learnt how to paint a foot . . . he knew a thing or two. It was clever of him to take in the Jews, to have thought of painting with gold colours . . . Even Ephrussi fell for it, who I really thought had some sense! I go and call on him one day, and I come face to face with a Gustave Moreau!’
I imagine Renoir entering the marble hall and coming up those winding stairs past Ignace’s apartment to Charles’s rooms on the second floor, and being let in and finding Moreau’s Jason in front of him: standing naked on the slaughtered dragon, holding up his broken spear and the golden fleece. Medea carries the small flask that contains the magic potion and rests her hand adoringly on his shoulder – ‘a dream, a flash of enchantment’, Laforgue’s ‘strange archaeologies of Moreau’.
Or perhaps he came face to face with Galatée, dedicated ‘à mon ami Charles Ephrussi’, a picture described by Huysmans as ‘a cavern illuminated by precious stones like a tabernacle, and containing that inimitable and radiant jewel, the white body, its breast and lips tinted with pink, Galatée, asleep . . .’ There is certainly a lot of gold here alongside the yellow armchair: Galatée is immured in a faux-Renaissance frame worthy of a Titian.
It is ‘Jew Art’, Renoir writes, galled to find his patron, the editor of the Gazette, with this gout Rothschild stuff on the walls, jewelled and mythic, contaminatingly close to his own paintings. Charles’s salon in the rue de Monceau has become ‘a cavern . . . like a tabernacle’. It has become a room that could anger Renoir, inspire Huysmans and even impress the sanguine Oscar Wilde: ‘Pour écrire il me faut de satin jaune,’ he writes in his Paris journal – ‘To write I need yellow satin.’
I realise that I am trying to police Charles’s taste. I am worried by gold and by Moreau. And even more so by the work of Paul Baudry, the decorator of the ceilings of the Paris Opéra, adept at working in the baroque cartouches of the new Belle Epoque buildings of Paris. Baudry’s work was reviled by the Impressionists as meretricious pap – an academic painter like the hated William-Adolphe Bouguereau. He was particularly successful with his nudes. He still is. There is a hugely popular poster of a Baudry with a wave about to break over a stretched-out girl, called Pearl and the Sea, that you can find in the racks of museum shops and on fridge magnets. And Baudry was Charles’s closest painter friend, their letters laced with endearments. Charles was his biographer and was named as his executor.
Perhaps I should continue to hunt down every picture that was in Charles’s room with the netsuke. I start to list all the museums in which his pictures now hang and to trace how they got there. I consider how long it would take to go from the Art Institute of Chicago to the Musée de la Ville de Gerardmer to put Manet’s Races at Longchamp alongside Degas’s double portrait of the General and the Rabbi. I wonder if I should take my white netsuke of the hare with amber eyes in my pocket to reunite object and image. For the span of a cup of coffee I mull this over as a real possibility, a way of keeping moving.
My timetable has disappeared. My other life as a potter is on hold. A museum needs a response. I am away, my assistants say when people ring, and cannot be reached. Yes, a big project. He will return your call.
Instead I make the familiar trip to