Small but perfectly formed

Some years ago, Edmund de Waal inherited a remarkable collection of 264 netsuke from his great-uncle Iggie, whom he had got to know 20 years previously while studying pottery and Japanese in Tokyo. Each week the young de Waal visited his urbane, elderly relative and his friend, Jiro. He heard ancient family stories and was introduced to the hare and all the other miniature carvings in ivory or wood, each one ‘a small, tough explosion of exactitude’. When eventually he inherited the netsuke, he felt he had also been ‘handed a responsibility — to them and to the people who have owned them.’

Although the netsuke originated in 18th- century Japan, they came to Iggie from his childhood home in Vienna and, before that, from belle époque Paris via his father’s cousin, Charles Ephrussi. De Waal, however, is not interested in

a few stitched-together anecdotes … I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers — hard and tricky and Japanese — and where it has been… I want to know whose hands it has been in, and what they felt about it and thought about it — if they thought about it. I want to know what it has witnessed.

Charles Ephrussi was the son of a Jewish grain merchant from Odessa, who moved to Paris when the family decided to set up a centre there for their operations. He lived in the rue de Monceau alongside Rothschilds and Camondos and bought the netsuke during the first flush of fashion for Japanese art after the country had been opened to the world by Commodore Perry. A friend to many contemporary artists, he was also studied by Proust as a model for Swann.