The Hare with Amber Eyes (6 page)

He mentions the term
japonisme
‘coined by my friend Philippe Burty’. For three whole weeks, before I find an even earlier mention, I think this is the first ever use of the term in print, and am filled with excitement that my netsuke and
japonisme
are linked so beautifully, a told-you-so moment of visceral happiness in the Publications section of the library.

Japanese box of golden lacquer from the collection of Louise Cahen d’Anvers

Charles gets very, very excited in this essay. He has discovered that Marie Antoinette had a collection of Japanese lacquer, and uses this knowledge to negotiate a lovely correspondence between the civilised world of the eighteenth-century rococo and that of Japan. In his essay, women, intimacy and lacquer seem to be woven together. Japanese lacquer, Charles explains, was rarely seen in Europe: ‘One simultaneously needed wealth and the fortune of being a favourite or a queen to reach for the envied possession of these almost unobtainable objects.’ But this is a moment – Paris in the Third Republic – when two remote and alienated worlds have collided. These lacquers, of a legendary rarity and so technically complex that they are almost unmakeable, the possessions of Japanese princes or Western queens, are now
here
in a Parisian shop, available to buy. For Charles, this lacquer has a quality of embedded poetry: not just rich and strange, but latent with stories of desire. His passion for Louise is palpable. The unobtainability of this lacquer creates the aura that surrounds it. You feel him reaching towards the golden Louise as he writes.

And then Charles picks a box up: ‘Take one of these lacquer boxes in your hand – so light, so soft to the touch, on which the artist has represented apple trees in blossom, sacred cranes flying across the water, and topping a mountain range, undulating under a cloud-filled sky, some people in flowing robes, in poses that seem bizarre to us but always gracious and elegant, under their large parasols…’

Holding this box, he talks about its exoticism. Its accomplishment requires a suppleness of the hand that is ‘entirely feminine, a persevering dexterity, a sacrifice of time’ that we in the West could not achieve. When you see and hold these lacquers – or netsuke or bronzes – you are immediately conscious of this work: they embody all the travail, and yet they are miraculously free.

The images in the lacquer interlace with his growing love of the paintings of the Impressionists: the images of flowering apple trees, cloud-filled skies and women in flowing robes are straight out of Pissarro and Monet. Japanese things – lacquers, netsuke, prints – conjure a picture of a place where sensations are always new, where art pours out of daily life, where everything exists in a dream of endless beautiful flow.

And embedded in Charles’s essay on lacquer are engravings of pieces from Louise’s collection and his own. His prose becomes a little much here, a little breathless, as he describes the interior of Louise’s cabinet of golden lacquer, over which morning glories trail. Their collections are formed by ‘the caprice of an opulent amateur who can satisfy all his covetousness’. In talking of their collections of these strangely rich objects he quietly brings himself and Louise together. They are both covetous and capricious, led by sudden desire. What they collect are objects to discover in your hands, ‘so light, so soft to the touch’.

It is a discreetly sensual act of disclosure, showing their pieces together in public. And assembling these lacquers also records their assignations: the collection records their love-affair, their own secret history of touch.

There is a review in
Le Gaulois
of an exhibition in 1884 of Charles’s lacquers. ‘One could spend days in front of these vitrines,’ writes the reviewer. I agree. I cannot trace which museums Charles and Louise’s lacquers have disappeared into, but I go back to Paris for a day to the Musée Guimet on the place d’Iéna, which now holds Marie Antoinette’s collection, and stand in front of their vitrines full of the mazy reflections of these softly gleaming things.

He brings these dense black-and-gold
objets
to his salon in the rue de Monceau, where he has recently laid down a golden Savonnerie carpet. It is finely woven from silk, made originally for a gallery in the Louvre in the seventeenth century. Its imagery is an allegory of Air: the four winds blowing their trumpets with fat cheeks, and everything is interlaced with butterflies and undulating ribbons. The carpet has been cut down in size so that it fits. I imagine walking across this floor. The whole room is golden.

To buy a little of Japan the best thing to do was to visit the place. This was the ultimate bit of one-upmanship of Charles’s neighbour Henri Cernuschi, or the industrialist Emile Guimet, the organiser of the Trocadéro exhibition.

If you could not match that, then you had to visit Parisian galleries for Japanese bibelots. These shops were known as places for encounters, popular sites for rendezvous for beau-monde lovers –
rendez-vous des couples adultères
, like Charles and Louise. In the old days, you would find these couples in the Jonque Chinoise, the shop in the rue de Rivoli, or its companion shop, the Porte Chinoise, in the rue Vivienne, where the galleriste Madame Desoye – who had sold Japanese art to the first wave of collectors – sat ‘enthroned in her jewels…almost a historic figure in our time like a fat Japanese idol’. Now Sichel’s had taken over.

Sichel was a great salesman, but not a curious or observant anthropologist. In a pamphlet published in 1883,
Notes d’un bibeloteur au Japon
, he wrote, ‘The country was entirely new to me: if I speak frankly I wasn’t interested in day-to-day life at all: all I wanted was to get the lacquers from the bazaar.’

And this is all he did. Soon after his arrival in 1874 in Japan, Sichel discovered a group of lacquer writing-boxes hidden under layers of dust in a Nagasaki bazaar. He ‘paid one dollar for each, and today many of these objects are valued at over 1,000 francs’. These were the writing-boxes that he sold – he fails to say – to his Parisian clients like Charles or Louise or Gonse for a great deal more than 1,000 francs.

Sichel continues:

In those days Japan was a treasure trove of art objects to be had at bargain prices. The streets of its cities were lined with shops of curios, textiles and pawn goods. Throngs of tradespeople would gather at one’s door at dawn: vendors of
fukusa
[scrolls] or bronze merchants carrying their goods in carts. There were even passers-by who would quite willingly sell the
netsuke
from their
obi
[belts]. The barrage of offers was so incessant that one was almost overwhelmed by a weariness and a distaste for buying. Nevertheless, these merchants in exotic objects were amiable tradesmen. They acted as your guide, bargained on your behalf in return for just a box of children’s sweets, and concluded business deals by throwing grand banquets in your honour which ended with enticing performances by female dancers and singers.

Japan was that box of sweets. Collecting in Japan encouraged a striking greed. Sichel writes of the urge to
‘évaliser le Japon’
– to plunder or rape the country. The stories of destitute daimyos selling their heirlooms, samurai their swords, dancers their bodies – and passers-by their netsuke – became a story of endless possibility. Anyone would sell you anything. Japan existed as a sort of parallel country of licensed gratification, artistic, commercial and sexual.

Japanese things carried an air of eroticised possibility, evoking not simply the shared encounter of lovers over a lacquer box or ivory bibelots. Japanese fans, bibelots and robes would only come alive in private encounters. They were props for dressing up, role-playing, the sensuous reimagining of the self. Of course they appealed to Charles with his ducal bed, canopied with swags of brocade, and his endless reconfiguring of his rooms in the rue de Monceau.

In James Tissot’s
La Japonaise au bain
a girl is naked but for a heavy brocade kimono, loose on her shoulders, standing on the threshold of a Japanese room. In Monet’s provocative portrait of his wife Camille, she is shown in a golden wig, clothed in a swirling robe of embroidered red on which a samurai unsheathes his sword. Behind her is a scattering of fans across the wall and the floor, like a burst of Whistler’s fireworks. It is very much a performance for the artist, one akin to that in Proust’s
Du côté de chez Swann
of the
demi-mondaine
Odette receiving Swann, dressed in her kimono in her drawing-room of Japanese silk cushions and screens and lanterns, filled with its heavy scent of chrysanthemums, an olfactory
japonisme
.

Ownership seemed transposed. These objects seemed to induce insatiability, to own you, make demands on you. Collectors themselves speak of the intoxication of hunting and buying, a process that could send you towards mania: ‘Of all the passions, of all without exception, the passion for the bibelot is perhaps the most terrible and invincible. The man smitten by an antique is a lost man. The bibelot is not only a passion, it is a mania,’ claimed the young writer Guy de Maupassant.

A haunting self-description of this comes in a strange book written by Charles’s scourge, Edmond de Goncourt. In
La maison d’un artiste
Goncourt describes each room of his own house in Paris in painstaking detail – the
boiseries
, the pictures, the books, the objects – in an attempt to evoke each object and picture and their placement as an act of homage to his dead brother, with whom he had lived. In two volumes, each of more than 300 pages, Goncourt constructs an autobiography and a travelogue, as much as an exhaustive inventory of a house through objects. Japanese art saturates the house. There are Japanese brocades and
kakemonos
, scrolls, in the hall. Even the garden is a carefully curated assortment of Chinese and Japanese trees and shrubs.

In a moment worthy of Borges,
his
collection even incorporates a grouping of Chinese art put together by a seventeenth-century Japanese ‘
bibeloteur exotique
’. There is endless play in Goncourt’s display between pictures, screens, scrolls on open display and those objects held in vitrines.

I imagine Goncourt, dark-eyed, an unruly white silk scarf knotted under his chin, pausing for effect at the door of his pearwood vitrine. He is holding one of his netsuke, and he starts to tell a story of the obsessive search for perfection that lies behind each object:

a whole class of exceptionally fine artists – usually specialists – are responsible for…fabrication and dedicate themselves exclusively to the reproduction of an object or a creature. Thus, we hear of an artist whose family has for three generations sculpted rats in Japan, nothing but rats. Alongside these professional artists, amid this manually gifted populace, there would be amateur netsuke sculptors, who amuse themselves by sculpting a little masterpiece for themselves. One day, Mr Philippe Sichel approached a Japanese man sitting on his threshold, notching a netsuke that was in its last stages of completion. Mr Sichel asked him if he would like to sell it…when it was completed. The Japanese man started laughing, and ended up telling him that that would take approximately a further eighteen months; then he showed him another netsuke that was attached to his belt, and informed him that it had taken him several years of work to make it. And as the conversation progressed between the two men, the amateur artist confessed to Mr Sichel that he did ‘not work like that in such a long-drawn out manner…that he needed to be in the process…that it was only on certain days…on days when he had smoked a pipe or two, after he felt gay and refreshed’, essentially letting him know that for this work, he needed hours of inspiration.

These bibelots of ivory or lacquer or mother-of-pearl all seemed to express the fact that Japanese workers had the imagination of makers of ‘
bijoux-joujoux lilliputiens
’, charming Lilliputian trinkets. That the Japanese are small, and make small things, was a commonplace in Paris. This idea of the miniature was often held as the reason that Japanese art seemed to lack ambition. They were brilliant at the laborious fashioning of rapid feeling, but fell down when it came to the grander feelings of tragedy or awe. That is why they lacked a Parthenon, a Rembrandt.

What they could do was everyday life. And emotion. It was these emotions that entranced Kipling when he first saw netsuke in Japan on his travels in 1889. He writes in one of his letters from Japan of:

a shop full of the wrecks of old Japan…The Professor raves about the cabinets in old gold and ivory studded with jade, lazuli, agate, mother-o’-pearl and cornelian, but to me more desirable than any wonder of five-stoned design are the buttons and netsuke that lie on cotton wool, and can be taken out and played with. Unfortunately the merest scratch of Japanese character is the only clue to the artist’s name, so I am unable to say who conceived, and in creamy ivory executed, the old man horribly embarrassed by a cuttle-fish; the priest who made the soldier pick up a deer for him and laughed to think that the brisket would be his and the burden his companion’s; or the dry, lean snake coiled in derision on a jawless skull mottled with the memories of corruption; or the Rabelaisian badger who stood on his head and made you blush though he was not half an inch long; or the little fat boy pounding his smaller brother; or the rabbit that had just made a joke; or – but there were scores of these notes, born of every mood of mirth, scorn and experience that sways the heart of man; and by this hand that has held half a dozen of them in its palm I winked at the shade of the dead carver! He had gone to his rest, but he had worked out in ivory three or four impressions that I had been hunting after in cold print.

And the Japanese could do erotica. This was hunted with a particular passion: Goncourt talked of his ‘debauches’ buying it at Sichel’s.
Shunga
– prints of acrobatic sexual positions or bizarre encounters between courtesans and fantastical creatures – were hunted out by Degas and Manet. Octopuses were especially favoured as their sinuosity offered great inventive possibilities. Goncourt records that he has just bought ‘an album of Japanese obscenities…They amuse me, enchant my eyes…The violence of the lines, unexpected conjunctions, the arrangement of the accessories, the caprice in their positioning and the clothes, the…picturesque quality of the genitals.’ Erotic netsuke were also highly popular with Parisian collectors. Stock themes included countless octopuses embracing naked girls, monkeys carrying very large and phallic mushrooms, and burst persimmons.

These erotic
objets
complemented other Western objects for male pleasure: the bronzes, small classical nudes perfect for the hand, that connoisseurs would keep in the study for learned discussion of the quality of the modelling, or of patination. Or the collections of small enamelled snuff-boxes that, when opened, showed priapic fauns or startled nymphs, little stagings of concealment and revelation. These small things to handle and to be moved around – slightly, playfully, discerningly – were kept in vitrines.

The chance to pass round a small and shocking object was too good to miss in the Paris of the 1870s. Vitrines had become essential to the witty and flirtatious intermittencies of salon life.