Free The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal Page B

You could see in through the glass door at the front and through the glass at the sides. A mirror at the back let the netsuke slide away into infinities of collecting. And they were all placed on green velvet. There are many different subtle variations of colours in netsuke, all the colours of the ivory, the horn and the boxwood: cream, wax, nut-brown, gold in this field of dense dark green.
    They are in front of me now, Charles’s collection within a collection.
    Charles places the netsuke on the green velvet in their dark vitrine with the mirrored back, in this, their first resting-place in the story. They are near the lacquer boxes, near the great hangings he brought back from Italy, close to the golden carpet.
    I wonder if he could resist going out onto the landing and turning left to tell his brother Ignace about his new acquisition.
    Netsuke cannot knock around your salon or your study unprotected. They get lost or dropped, dusty, chipped. They need a place to rest, preferably in company with other bibelots. This is why vitrines come to matter. And in this journey towards the netsuke, I became more and more intrigued by vitrines, glass display cases.
    I kept coming across them in Louise’s salon. I had seen them preserved in Belle Époque mansions, read about them in Charles’s exhibition reviews in the Gazette and in descriptions in Rothschild inventories. And now that Charles has one of his own, I realise they are part of the performance of salon life, not just part of the furnishings. A collector friend of Charles is described in the act of placing Japanese objects in a vitrine, ‘like a painter applying a stroke to his canvas. The harmony is complete and the refinement exquisite…’
    The vitrines exist so that you can see objects, but not touch them: they frame things, suspend them, tantalise through distance.
    This is what I realise now I failed to understand about vitrines. I spent the first twenty years of my life as a potter earnestly trying to get objects out of the glass cases in which my pots were often placed in galleries and museums. They die, I’d say, behind glass, held in that airlock. Vitrines were a sort of coffin: things need to be out and to take their chances away from the protection of formal display, to be liberated. ‘Out of the drawing-room and into the kitchen!’ I wrote in a sort of manifesto. There was too much in the way. There was trop de verre , too much glass, as a great architect commented on seeing a rival Modernist’s house of glass.
    But the vitrine – as opposed to the museum’s case – is for opening. And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, and then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric.
    Charles’s friend Cernuschi had a great collection of Japanese art just down the road next to the gates to the parc Monceau, displayed on radical white walls. It made the Japanese objects ‘look unhappy’, as if they were in the Louvre, a critic remarked. Displaying Japanese art as Art made it problematic, over-serious. But Charles’s salon up the hill, a place for a strange encounter between old Italian things and new Japanese things, is not a museum.
    Charles’s vitrine is a threshold.
    And these netsuke are perfect for the life of Charles’s salon. The golden Louise opening up her vitrine of Japanese things, fishing, handing things out to be looked at and handled, to be caressed, shows that Japanese things are made for digressive conversation, made for distraction. These netsuke add something very particular to Charles’s way of living, I think. They are the first things that have any connection to everyday life, even an exotic everyday life. They are wonderful and highly sensual, of course, but they are not princely like his Medici bed or his Marie Antoinette lacquers. They are for touching.
    Above all, they make you laugh in many different ways. They are witty and