This year I had the good fortune to see a 15-minute firework display that burst over the crowds and magnificent buildings of imperial Vienna, including the headquarters of Casinos Austria.
From my holiday reading book, The Hare with Amber Eyes, I discovered that this fi ne edifice on Vienna’s Ringstrasse had been the family home of the author’s great-grandfather and was originally called the Palais Ephrussi.
The Ephrussi story is that of grand houses, superb connoisseurship and ultimately doom for family and collections set against the flow of the momentous events of central European history.
This enchanting book combines ideas of curatorship, ownership, remembering, prejudice and social mores together with themes central to the museum profession: collecting, scholarship and the meaning of things.
Central to the narrative are 264 netsuke, tiny carved ivory pieces depicting Japanese peasants and beasts (including the eponymous hare), collected after Japan was first opened to westerners in the 1860s and all thing Japanese became the fashion in the mansions of wealthy Europeans.
De Waal takes us to his forebears’ former homes in Paris, Vienna and Tokyo, witnessing the places where the netsuke once resided alongside one of Europe’s grandest private art collections. As the elegance of the turn-of-the-century Vienna gives way to the darkness of the interwar years, so we discover the fate of the family and the collections.
The netsuke are last seen in the hands of the author’s children, as survivors, objects of the imagination and at the same time representatives of a long and remarkable family history.
John Edwards is the head of collections at Aberdeen Art Gallery
From my holiday reading book, The Hare with Amber Eyes, I discovered that this fi ne edifice on Vienna’s Ringstrasse had been the family home of the author’s great-grandfather and was originally called the Palais Ephrussi.
The Ephrussi story is that of grand houses, superb connoisseurship and ultimately doom for family and collections set against the flow of the momentous events of central European history.
This enchanting book combines ideas of curatorship, ownership, remembering, prejudice and social mores together with themes central to the museum profession: collecting, scholarship and the meaning of things.
Central to the narrative are 264 netsuke, tiny carved ivory pieces depicting Japanese peasants and beasts (including the eponymous hare), collected after Japan was first opened to westerners in the 1860s and all thing Japanese became the fashion in the mansions of wealthy Europeans.
De Waal takes us to his forebears’ former homes in Paris, Vienna and Tokyo, witnessing the places where the netsuke once resided alongside one of Europe’s grandest private art collections. As the elegance of the turn-of-the-century Vienna gives way to the darkness of the interwar years, so we discover the fate of the family and the collections.
The netsuke are last seen in the hands of the author’s children, as survivors, objects of the imagination and at the same time representatives of a long and remarkable family history.
John Edwards is the head of collections at Aberdeen Art Gallery
