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![]() ![]() ![]() De Waal provides vivid descriptions of the items making up the netsuke collection. Totaling 264 carvings made of wood and ivory, they were maintained up until de Waal, the fifth generation of the family, inherited them. What remained was their netsuke collection. By the end of World War II, most of their estate had been sold off throughout the world, rendering their various artifacts impossible to trace. ![]() The reign of the Ephrussis was brief, owing to the quick rise and decline of their banking empire. ![]() De Waal begins with a description of the netsuke collection’s previous owners, the Ephrussis, an extremely wealthy Jewish banking family, often identified as similar to the Rothschilds, who lived in Paris and Vienna in the nineteenth century. The book is a meditation on the elegant narrative threads that connect art, history, and family, persisting across large spans of time. In doing so, he also traces the evolution of his own lineage and the various fissures induced by crises of identity and war. A fifth-generation inheritor of a collection of tiny but invaluable wood and ivory carvings called netsuke that originated in the dynasties of pre-modern Japan, he tracks the movement of his collection through time from nineteenth-century Europe to his present day in 2009. The Hare with Amber Eyes is a 2010 family memoir written by Edmund de Waal. ![]()
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