The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [40]
11. A ‘VERY BRILLIANT FIVE O’CLOCK’
In October 1891 Charles took the netsuke to a new home on the avenue d’Iéna. Number 11 is larger than the Hôtel Ephrussi on the rue de Monceau and more austere on the outside – no swags, no urns. It is so large that it is practically invisible. I stand and look. The spaces between the floors are greater: these are rooms with volume. Charles moved here with his brother Ignace three years after their widowed mother died. I chance my luck and ring a bell and explain my mission to a woman with a perfect and unwavering smile, who explains, quite slowly to me, that I am completely wrong about who lived here, that it is private and that she has never heard of this family. She watches me until I am back in the street.
I’m furious. A week later I find that the brothers’ house was torn down and rebuilt in the 1920s.
This new area is even grander than the rue de Monceau. It is only twenty years since the Ephrussi arrived in Paris, but this was a family that now felt secure. The bachelor brothers’ house was 300 yards down the hill from the grandeur of Jules and Fanny’s mansion, with its emblems of ears of corn above the windows and their entwined initials over the huge gateway into the courtyard. Louise’s palace was directly across the road in the rue Bassano. The area is on the hill to the north of the Champ de Mars, where the Eiffel Tower had just been erected. It was the place to be: it was talked of as the ‘hill of arts’.
Charles’s taste was still changing. His passion for the Japanese was being slowly overtaken. The cult had become so widespread that everyone in the 1880s had houses full of Japonaiseries: they were now regarded as bric-a-brac, settling like dust on every available surface. ‘Everything,’ said Alexandre Dumas in 1887, ‘is Japanese now’: Zola’s house outside Paris, awash with Japanese objets, was considered slightly risible. It had become much more difficult to make a claim for their special attributes when they had become mainstream, when the posters for bicycles or absinthe flapping off the hoardings now resembled Japanese woodblock prints. There were still serious collectors of Japanese art – including Guimet, who lived next door – and much more art-historical knowledge than in the melee of ten years before. De Goncourt had published his studies of Hokusai and Utamaro, Siegfried Bing had his journal Le Japon artistique, but it was no longer followed with religious intensity in Charles’s fashionable circle.
Proust records this moment of transition in the drawing-room of Swann’s lover, the demi-mondaine Odette: ‘the Far East was retreating more and more before the invading forces of the eighteenth century . . . nowadays it was rarely in Japanese kimonos that Odette received her intimates, but rather in the bright and billowing silk of a Watteau housecoat’.
It was a change of exoticisms that was noticed in Charles, critic, collector and curator. A journalist wrote that Charles had begun ‘little by little to detach himself from . . . [Japan] . . . and to turn more and more towards the French XVIIIth century, the productions of Meissen and of the Empire, of which he has collected an ensemble of creations of the highest quality’. In his new house Charles hung on the walls of his study a suite of tapestries depicting children’s games, woven from silver thread. And he created a series of enfilade rooms, which he decorated with formal suites of pale Empire furniture with its bronze mounts, on which he placed garnitures of Sèvres and Meissen porcelain: there were careful rhythms here. And then he hung the Moreaus, Manets and Renoirs.
Proust has the Duchesse de Guermantes rhapsodising over this kind of neoclassical furniture, seen in the house of the Duc d’Iéna: ‘all those things invading our houses, the Sphinxes crouching at the feet of the armchairs, the snakes coiled round candelabra . . . all the Pompeian lamps, the little boat-shaped beds which look as if they have been floating on the Nile’. A bed