The Hare with Amber Eyes (9 page)

Like the repeated themes in the netsuke, Japanese prints also give the possibility of the series – forty-seven views of a famous mountain suggested a way of returning in differing ways and reinterpreting formal pictorial elements. Haystacks, the bend of the river, poplars, the cliff face of Rouen Cathedral – all share this poetic return. Whistler, the master of ‘variations’ and ‘caprices’, explained that ‘On any given canvas the colours must, so to speak, be embroidered on; that is, the same colour must reappear at intervals, like a single thread in an embroidery.’ Zola, an early advocate, wrote of Manet’s paintings that ‘This art of simplification is to be likened to that of Japanese prints; they resemble it in their strange elegance and magnificent patches of colour.’ Simplification seemed to lie at the heart of this new aesthetic, but only if it was combined with ‘patchiness’, with an abstraction of colour or with its repetition.

Sometimes all it took was to paint Parisian life in the rain. A flotilla of patchy grey umbrellas taking the place of parasols turns Paris into a kind of Edo.

When Charles writes – beautifully and with precision – about his friends, he understands how radical they are, both in technique and subject matter. It reminds one of the best critiques of Impressionism. Their aim was:

to make the figures indivisible from their background, as though they were the product of it, so that to appreciate the picture the eye must take it in as a whole, looking at it from the correct distance – such are the ideals of the new school. It has not learnt its optical catechism, it disdains pictorial rules and regulations, it renders what it sees as it sees it, spontaneously, well or badly, uncompromisingly, without comment, without verbiage. In its horror of platitude it seeks for fresh themes, it haunts the corridors of theatres, cafés, cabarets, even low music-halls; the glare of cheap dance-halls does not alarm its members; and they go boating on the Seine in the Paris suburbs.

This was to be the setting of Renoir’s bravura
Le déjeuner des canotiers
, the
Luncheon of the Boating Party
. It shows a pleasingly louche afternoon at the Maison Fournaise, a restaurant by the Seine at one of the newly popular places that Parisian day-trippers could reach by train. Pleasure boats and a skiff can be seen through the silvery-grey willows. A red-and-white striped awning protects the party from the glare of the sun. It is after lunch in Renoir’s new world of painters, patrons and actresses, and everyone is a friend. Models smoke, drink and talk amongst the detritus of the empty bottles and the meal left on the tables. There are no rules or regulations here.

The actress Ellen Andrée, in a hat with a flower pinned to it, raises her glass to her lips. Baron Raoul Barbier, a former mayor of colonial Saigon, his brown bowler hat pushed back, talks to the young daughter of the proprietor. Her brother, straw-hatted like a professional oarsman, stands in the foreground surveying the lunch. Caillebotte, relaxed and fit in a white singlet and boater, sits astride his chair looking at the young seamstress Aline Charigot, Renoir’s lover and future wife. The artist Paul Lhote sits with a proprietorial arm around the actress Jeanne Samary. It is a matrix of smiling conversation and flirtation.

And Charles is there. He is the man at the very back, in the top hat and black suit, turning slightly away, seen glancingly. You can just see his red-brown beard. He is talking with a pleasantly open-faced, poorly shaved Laforgue, dressed as a proper poet in a working man’s cap and what could even be a corduroy jacket.

I doubt that Charles really wore his Benedictine clothes, heavy and dark, to a boating party in the summer sunshine, a top hat instead of a boater. This is an in-joke about his Maecenas uniform between friends, Renoir suggesting that patrons and critics are needed, somewhere in the background, on the edge, even on the sunniest and most liberated of days.

Proust writes of this picture, noting a ‘gentleman…wearing a top hat at a boating party where he was clearly out of place, which proved that for Elstir he was not only a regular sitter, but a friend, perhaps a patron’.

Charles is clearly out of place, but he is a sitter, friend and patron and he is there. Charles Ephrussi – or at least the back of Charles’s head – enters art history.

It is July and I’m in my studio in south London. It is down a track between a betting shop and a Caribbean takeaway, sandwiched in amongst car repairers. It’s a noisy area, but it is a beautiful space, with my wheels and kilns in a long and airy workshop and a room up some steep white stairs for my books. It is here that I display some of my finished work, groups of porcelain cylinders placed in lead-lined boxes at this moment; and it is here that I stack my piles of notes on early Impressionism and continue to write about the first collector of my netsuke.

It is a calm space, books and pots being good companions. And this is where I bring clients who want to commission something from me. It is very strange for me to be reading so much about Charles as a patron and his friendship with Renoir and Degas. It is not just the vertiginous descent from doing the commissioning to being commissioned. Or, indeed, from having paintings to writing about them. It is that I have been working long enough as a potter to know that being commissioned is an extremely delicate business. You are grateful, of course, but gratitude is different from feeling indebted. It is an interesting question for any artist: how long must you go on feeling grateful once someone has bought your work? It must have been especially complex given the youth of this patron – thirty-one in 1881 – and the age of some of the artists: Manet was forty-eight when he painted that bundle of asparagus. And, I think when I look at an image of a Pissarro that Charles owned, of poplar trees in a breeze, it must be especially delicate if your artistic credo is of freedom of expression, and spontaneity and lack of compromise.

Renoir was in need of money, and so Charles persuaded an aunt to sit for him; then he began work on Louise. It took a long summer of delicate negotiation between the lovers and the painter; Fanny, writing from the Chalet Ephrussi where Charles was staying, details the lengths to which he went to make sure it all came off successfully. It was quite a labour to bring about these two paintings. The first is of Louise’s elder daughter Irène, with reddish-golden hair, like her mother’s, falling around her shoulders. The second, impossibly saccharine portrait is of the younger girls, Alice and Elisabeth. The two girls also have their mother’s hair. They stand in front of a dark burgundy curtain, held open to reveal the salon beyond, holding hands, as if for reassurance – a confection of pink and blue ruffles and ribbons. Both pictures were exhibited at the Salon of 1881. I’m not sure how much Louise liked them. After all this work she was shockingly late in paying the modest charge of 1,500 francs. I find myself similarly embarrassed when I discover a cross note from Degas reminding Charles about a bill.

All this commissioned work for Renoir made some of Charles’s other painter friends mistrustful. Degas was especially severe: ‘Monsieur Renoir, you have no integrity. It is unacceptable that you paint to order. I gather that you now work for financiers, that you do the rounds with Monsieur Charles Ephrussi, next you’ll be exhibiting at the Mirlitons with Monsieur Bouguereau!’ This anxiety was compounded when Charles started buying pictures by other artists; this patron seemed to be moving on, looking for new sensations. And it was at this point that Charles’s Jewishness made him suspect.

Charles had bought two paintings by Gustave Moreau. Goncourt described his work as the ‘watercolours of a poet goldsmith, which seem to have been washed with the gleams and patina of the treasures in the
Thousand and One Nights’.
They were rich, highly symbolic, Parnassian paintings of Salome, Hercules, Sappho, Prometheus. Moreau’s subjects are barely clothed, except for a fall of gauze. The landscapes are classical, full of ruined temples, the details exactingly coded. It was all a very, very long way from a meadow in the wind, the currents of a river amongst ice, or a seamstress bent over her work.

Huysmans would write his scandalous novel
À rebours
(
Against the Grain
) about what it felt like to live with a Moreau painting. Or, to be more exact, in the atmosphere created by a Moreau painting. His hero, Des Esseintes, was based closely on the decadent Comte Robert de Montesquiou, a man dedicated to achieving a totally aestheticised existence, finessing the details of his house so that every sensory experience would immerse him totally. The apogee was a tortoise whose shell was encrusted with gemstones so that its slow passage across a room would enliven the pattern of a Persian carpet. This impressed Oscar Wilde, who noted in French in his Paris journal that ‘a friend of Ephrussi has an emerald-encrusted tortoise. I also need emeralds, living bibelots…’ This was substantially better than opening the door of a vitrine.

In Des Esseintes’s attenuated existence there was one artist ‘who most ravished him with unceasing transports of pleasure – Gustave Moreau. He had purchased his two masterpieces, and night after night he would stand dreaming in front of one of these, a picture of Salome’: he is so involved in these intensely charged paintings that he becomes one with them.

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
goût 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 Époque 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 Wave
, 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 Gérardmer 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 Paris and stand beneath Baudry’s ceilings in the Opéra and then rush over to the Musée d’Orsay to look at Charles’s single asparagus stem by Manet and the pair of Moreau pictures they now own, to see if it all coheres, if it all sings, if I can see what his eye saw. And, of course, I cannot, for the simple reason that Charles buys what he likes. He is not buying art for the sake of coherence, or to fill gaps in his collection. He is buying pictures from his friends, with all the complexities that brings with it.

Charles has many friendships beyond the studios of painters. Saturday evenings would be spent at the Louvre with colleagues, each collector or writer bringing a sketch or an object, or a problem of attribution for discussion: ‘anything could be brought to the table, save for pedantry! What we would learn there, and never need to doubt! What tireless voyages we made in those beautiful chairs in the Louvre, across all the museums of Europe!’ remembered the art historian Clément de Ris. Charles had stimulating colleagues working at the
Gazette
. He had friends for neighbours, the Camondo brothers and Cernuschi, men to whom you could happily show an acquisition.

Charles was becoming a public figure. In 1885 he had become the proprietor of the
Gazette
. He helped raise money for the purchase of a Botticelli for the Louvre. He had his writing. There was his curatorial work: he helped to organise exhibitions of Old Master drawings in 1879, and two of portraits in 1882 and 1885. It was one thing to be a covetous, vagabonding young man and quite another to have these responsibilities and this scrutiny. He had just received the
Légion d’honneur
for his contribution to the arts.

Most parts of this busy life were lived in the public view of colleagues, neighbours, friends, his young secretaries, his lover and his family.

Proust, a neophyte if not yet quite a friend, had become a regular visitor to the apartment, drinking in Charles’s empyrean conversation, the way he arranged his new treasures, his span across society. Charles knows the socially ravenous Proust well enough to tell him that it is time to leave a dinner after midnight, as the hosts are desperate for bed. For some long-buried slight, Ignace in the apartment next door pins him down as the ‘Proustaillon’ – a rather adept description of Proust’s butterfly flitting from one social occasion to another.

Proust has also become a presence in the offices of the
Gazette
in the rue Favart. He is diligent here: sixty-four works of art that will appear later in the twelve novels that make up
À la recherche du temps perdu
were illustrated in the
Gazette
, a huge proportion of the works’ visual texture. Like Laforgue before him, he has sent Charles his early writings on art and has received a tough critique and then a first commission. For Proust it is to be a study of Ruskin. The preface to Proust’s translation of Ruskin’s
Bible of Amiens
has as its dedicatee ‘M. Charles Ephrussi, always so good to me’.

Charles and Louise are still lovers, though I am not sure if Louise has another lover, or several other lovers. Charles, who has a quality of discretion, leaves no traces here, and I feel frustrated that I cannot find more. I note that Laforgue was the first of a number of much younger men who would work for him more as acolytes than as secretaries, and I wonder at this series of intense relationships in his heady cavern-like rooms lit up by yellow satin and those Moreaus. The gossip in Paris was that Charles was
entre deux lits
, bisexual.

That spring of 1889 Ephrussi et Cie prospers, but family matters are exceedingly complicated. The robustly heterosexual Ignace, along with other wistful bachelors, was devoted to the Countess Potocka. This intriguing countess, with looks that Proust described as ‘at once delicate, majestic and malicious’, her black hair pulled apart in a centre parting, held sway over a coterie of young men who would wear sapphire badges inscribed with the motto ‘
À la Vie, à la Mort
’. She holds ‘Maccabee’ dinners at which they would pledge to perform outrageous acts in her honour. As the Maccabees were Judaean martyrs, this must make her Judith, I realise belatedly, the heroine who cut off the head of Holofernes when he was drunk. After one dinner a letter to de Maupassant records that ‘Ignace is a little more far-gone than the others…and has the bright idea of walking completely naked through the Paris streets…’ and has been packed off to the country to recover.

Charles, at forty, was poised between all these different worlds. His private taste had become public property. Everything about him was aesthetic. He was known in Paris as an aesthete whose commissions and pronouncements and cut of jacket were scrutinised. He was a devotee of the Opéra.

Even his dog was called Carmen.

I find a letter to her, c/o Monsieur C. Ephrussi, 81 rue de Monceau, in the archives of the Louvre, from Puvis de Chavannes, the Symbolist painter of pallid figures and washed-out landscapes.