Ingres, the painter, had a passion for the violin, which he is said to have played to visitors rather than showing them his pictures. Hence the French expression, ‘un violon d’Ingres’, for “an activity other than that for which one is well-known or at which one excels”.

Sadly, according to Larousse, his playing was not of a particularly high standard (‘fort ordinaire’), and one feels for his visitors, desperate to clap their eyes on a few more curvy inhabitants of imaginary harems rather than sit through yet another outburst of amateur fiddling.

Sometimes, luckily, we find people whose ‘violon d’Ingres’ matches their prowess in the field for which they are best known. Such a person is the distinguished ceramicist Edmund De Waal, whose family memoir, ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’, was nominated ‘Non-fiction Book of the Year’ by a good 20 critics and fellow writers at the end of 2010.  And, having collected the Costa Biography award, it was firm favourite to take the overall ‘Costa Book of the Year 2010’ award, until pipped to the post by Jo Shapcott’s poetry collection, ‘Of Mutability’.

So I was delighted to find a copy among my Christmas presents from Jane, and have just finished reading it aloud to her, a few pages morning and evening.

I say ‘family memoir’, but De Waal has had the brilliant idea of introducing his family almost as incidental characters revolving around a collection of 264 netsuke - small sculptural objects, in ivory or hardwood, originally used to suspend objects from the sash of a Japanese man’s kimono.

These came into the family in Paris in the 1870s, at the height of ‘Japonisme’, when all things Japanese were intriguing and sought after, with impoverished painters buying the occasional print, and rich ‘amateurs’ snapping up lacquer cabinets made for an emperor.

Among this latter group was Charles Ephrussi (the distinguished looking subject of the print at the top of this page), who was a cousin of the author’s  great-grandfather Viktor von Ephrussi. And it was Charles who bought the collection as one vast job-lot from a specialist dealer, to share his apartment with paintings by Manet, Berthe Morisot, Sisley, Pissaro, Mary Cassatt, Degas and - above all - Renoir (the last of whom included the elegant art-lover - incongruous in top-hat and frock-coat - among the party of canoeists and their friends relaxing over lunch, in his Déjeuner des Canotiers of 1881).

The Phillips

Collection,

Washington D.C.

The most charming story of his life as a collector concerns his commissioning Edouard Manet to paint him a still-life of a bunch of asparagus (presumably as a tribute to the great Dutch still-life painter, Adriaen Coorte, who flourished at the end of the 17th century).

Rijksmuseum

Amsterdam

They agreed on a fee of 800 francs, a substantial sum, but Charles - delighted at the sight of Monet’s version - sent him 1,000 francs as payment.

Cologne,

Wallraf-Richartz-Museum

The following week, ‘Charles received a small canvas signed with a simple M in return. It was a single asparagus stalk laid across a table with an accompanying note: “This seems to have escaped from the bundle”’

Paris,

Musée d'Orsay

Charles, third son of a prominent banker, had no need to earn his living. But he was more than just a rich collector: he wrote a scholarly monograph on Albrecht Dürer, and eventually took over the editorship of the influential Gazette des Beaux Arts. This put him right at the heart of the Parisian art world, sensitive to the slightest changes in fashion.

So, with Japanese artefacts no longer en vogue, he decided to give his entire collection of netsuke, in their specially designed case, to his cousin Viktor in Vienna, on the occasion of his marriage to Emmy Schey von Koromia in 1899. 

Viktor and Emmy’s first child Elisabeth married a young Dutchman called Hendrick de Waal.  Their son Viktor had four children, the third being Edmund de Waal who has written this enthralling account of how the netsuke survived the war, moving first to Tokyo and, eventually, to London.

To be honest, I’ve never been much of a fan of the author’s ceramics, despite their international reputation: too clean, too clinical, too predictable for my taste. But what he has done as a writer in his spare time, his violon d’Ingres, now that is something else.