Family Saga
Edmund de Waal’s elegant and much praised family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, is now an art and antiques exhibition, crossing from the pages of literature to the walls of the Jewish Museum in New York. The show, which bears the same name as de Waal’s 2010 book, is grounded in the now-famous group of old netsuke—small ivory, wood, or lacquer Japanese sculptures—acquired in the 1870s by Charles Ephrussi (Fig. 7), de Waal’s great-great-uncle—a connoisseur, writer, patron of the arts, and man on the scene in the avant-garde Paris of the last decades of the nineteenth century.