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Authors: Edmund de Waal
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Bizen, the Japanese pottery village in which I studied when I was seventeen, excited to finally get my passionate hands on those simple, tactile tea-bowls.
In Les lacques japonais au Trocadéro , a long essay published in the Gazette in 1878, Charles describes the five or six vitrines full of lacquer on exhibition at the Trocadéro in Paris. This is his fullest writing about Japanese art. As elsewhere, he is in turn academic (he is exercised about dating), descriptive and ultimately lyrical about what he sees in front of him.
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,
In Les lacques japonais au Trocadéro , a long essay published in the Gazette in 1878, Charles describes the five or six vitrines full of lacquer on exhibition at the Trocadéro in Paris. This is his fullest writing about Japanese art. As elsewhere, he is in turn academic (he is exercised about dating), descriptive and ultimately lyrical about what he sees in front of him.
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,
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