The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the ‘netsuke’, they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined…

The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the world; in the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi was part of a wealthy new generation settling in Paris. Marcel Proust was briefly his secretary and used Charles as the model for the aesthete Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. Charles’s passion was collecting; the netsuke, bought when Japanese objets were all the rage in the salons, were sent as a wedding present to his banker cousin in Vienna.

Later, three children – including a young Ignace – would play with the netsuke as history reverberated around them. The Anschluss and Second World War swept the Ephrussis to the brink of oblivion. Almost all that remained of their vast empire was the netsuke collection, smuggled out of the huge Viennese palace (then occupied by Hitler’s theorist on the ‘Jewish Question’), one piece at a time, in the pocket of a loyal maid – and hidden in a straw mattress.

In this stunningly original memoir, Edmund de Waal travels the world to stand in the great buildings his forebears once inhabited. He traces the network of a remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. And, in prose as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves, he tells the story of a unique collection which passed from hand to hand – and which, in a twist of fate, found its way home to Japan.

Winner at the Costa Book Awards 2010

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Authors Biography

Born in Nottingham in 1964, Edmund de Waal started to pot when he was five. Close to clay throughout his school years, he was taught by Geoffrey Whiting when a scholar at King’s School in Canterbury. A disciple of the ‘Anglo-Oriental’ potter Bernard Leach, Whiting introduced de Waal to English ceramics as well as to ceramics from China, Korea and Japan. Leaving school, de Waal knew that he wanted to be a potter. He continued to train with Whiting, read English at Trinity Hall in Cambridge and then set up his own studio, first on the Welsh border and then in Sheffield. Having completed a postgraduate diploma in Japanese language at the University of Sheffield, de Waal spent one year at the Mejiro Ceramics Studio in Tokyo. Following his return from Japan, he set up a studio in London in 1993 and gradually focused his work from functional wares executed in clay to installations worked in porcelain. As much influenced by Sung dynasty wares as by the Bauhaus movement, de Waal is also a prolific writer and has been Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster since 2004.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts since 1996, de Waal’s work has been the subject of numerous group and solo exhibitions in Britain and abroad and can be seen in public collections in Cambridge, Edinburgh, London and Oxford, as well as in New York and Tokyo. He also acts as an advisor to museums and regularly curates exhibitions. Considered one of the finest potters of his generation, de Waal was awarded the silver medal at the World Ceramics Exposition in Korea in 2003.

Edmund de Waal lives with his family in London.

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