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The Hare with Amber Eyes is a 2010 memoir about the author’s family and their collection of netsuke. Netsuke are tiny carvings that originated in Japan’s dynasties, and they are made out of wood or ivory. The book tells the story of how these carvings moved through time from nineteenth-century Europe to present day 2009. It also traces the evolution of his lineage, as well as various fissures induced by crises such as wars and identity issues.
De Waal begins with a description of the netsuke collection’s previous owners, the Ephrussis. The family was extremely wealthy and lived in Paris and Vienna during the nineteenth century. Their reign was cut short by their downfall as bankers; most of their estate had been sold off throughout the world by World War II, making it impossible to trace what remained—their netsuke collection. It totaled 264 carvings made of wood and ivory that were maintained until de Waal inherited them from his fifth generation family members.
De Waal provides detailed descriptions of the netsuke collection. He mentions that Charles Ephrussi collected these items during the height of Japanese art’s popularity in Paris, which led to a rise in their value. De Waal also discusses how Charles rejected his family’s banking business and decided to follow his own path by studying art and other intellectual pursuits. The writer learns that Charles was friends with many artists, helped promote Impressionism before it became popular at the turn of the twentieth century, and even appears as a model for an artist in Renoir’s Luncheon of Boating Party (1880). In addition, Marcel Proust observed Charles closely and used him as a model for one of his characters named Swann in Remembrance Of Things Past (1913).
De Waal’s research shows that Charles sent the carvings to Vienna, where his cousin Viktor received them as a wedding gift. Viktor allowed his children to play with the netsuke when they wanted toys to pass the time while their mother tried on dresses for balls. Meanwhile, the Ephrussi family rode on its former glory in nineteenth-century Europe but struggled to adapt its identity to changes happening in contemporary European life. This struggle manifested as rebellion in some of the children and led Emmy’s eldest daughter, who disliked fashion and elite society, toward becoming a writer. Her correspondence with Rilke stimulated her poetic mind.
The Anschluss, where Austria was annexed by Germany, shattered the Ephrussis’ world. Charles and his family were either imprisoned or scattered around the world, and a member of Hitler’s inner circle took over their opulent palace on the edge of the Ringstrasse. A huge library of books was confiscated and destroyed by Nazi regime. Luckily, however, netsuke were hidden in a straw mattress and then returned to them after World War II ended thanks to Anna who hid them there during war times. The Ephrussi family faced dissolution of their banking empire after World War II ended.
A Hare with Amber Eyes is a story about an artwork that survived through the radical social and political transformations of time. Although it’s impossible to trace back its lineage, one can still appreciate how this piece became part of another person’s life. De Waal researched on how the artwork passed from Europe to his possession in present day as part of art history research and also for aesthetic reasons.
