Some collections of like objects grow in increments, the product of years of patient searching and gradual refinement, the substitution of an existing item with a better one – in other words, choices made on the basis of increasingly refined learning and connoisseurship and expenditure. These 264 netsuke do not constitute a collection such as that. They were purchased all at once by a first cousin of the author’s great-grandfather, and have not been added to since. Both cousins, Charles Ephrussi (1849–1905) and Viktor Ephrussi (1860–1945), were scions of a wealthy firm of assimilated Jewish financiers à la Rothschild, who came west from the Imperial Russian port city of Odessa, and prospered first in Vienna and then in Paris. The elder M. Ephrussi – one of the known models for Proust’s Swann, sometime co-proprietor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts – was a major donor to the Louvre. In 1881 he helped them to acquire two frescoes by Sandro Botticelli from the Villa Lemmi in Florence: Lorenzo Tornabuoni presented by Grammar to Prudence and the Liberal Arts and Giovanna degli Albizzi receiving flowers from Venus (both c.1486). Ephrussi was also a scholar of art, the author of Albert Dürer et ses dessins (1882), and himself an ambitious collector, having at one time owned Monet’s Bathers at La Grenouillère (National Gallery, London); Manet’s Races at Longchamp (Art Institute of Chicago), and his Bunch of asparagus (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne); Degas’s General Mellinet and Chief Rabbi Astruc (Musée de la Ville de Gérardmer); two enormous paintings by Gustave Moreau, and many other modern pictures by Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-August Renoir, among others. Indeed, the urbane, mustachioed Ephrussi appears in a silk topper at the rear of Renoir’s Luncheon of the boating party in the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.

Ephrussi’s interest in Japanese art was first stimulated by lacquer, and it was not until he had amassed a collection of dozens of fine examples of Japanese lacquer boxes and cabinets that he acquired his 264 netsuke from the hugely successful Japoniste dealer Philippe Sichel, author of Notes d’un bibeloteur au Japon (1883), who most probably sourced this group in Tokyo or Kyoto. The creepy Edmond de Goncourt was a good customer, though he quipped that Sichel’s was ‘where the Jewish money comes’. Many of the netsuke are signed by famous carvers, are of extremely fine quality, and mainly date from well before the arrival of Commodore Perry. A few were in the 1880s crude recent productions created for the burgeoning Western market, but on the whole the collection appears to have been assembled with a shrewd and discerning eye, by whom, alas, we do not know. It was almost certainly not the expedient Sichel, nor any of his agents who were inclined to buy netsuke randomly from perplexed Japanese simply walking the streets of Tokyo. It seems likely that a now-forgotten Japanese connoisseur formed the core of the collection.

The collection passed as a wedding present from Charles Ephrussi to his youngest cousin, Viktor Ephrussi. Viktor married Baroness Emmy Schey von Koromla in Vienna, in 1899, and together they took up residence in the enormous Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse. There the netsuke remained, surviving the Great War, the collapse of the Austrian Empire in 1918, the disastrous Spanish flu pandemic, the Depression, and the coming of the Anschluss in 1938, during which time the Ephrussi businesses managed to stay afloat. Somehow the netsuke were overlooked by the Gestapo, who confiscated almost everything else. They were protected through the war years by a brave servant named Anna, who concealed them inside her mattress. It was she who restored them in 1945 to Viktor’s eldest child, the author’s grandmother Elisabeth de Waal. Elisabeth took them back with her to England, where most of the family had sought refuge since 1938. In 1947 she gave them to her peripatetic, unmarried younger brother Ignace (Iggy), a businessman, who took them with him to Japan, where he lived the rest of his life. Upon his death they passed to Iggy’s partner of forty-two years, Juro Sugiyama, and thence to the author, a distinguished ceramic artist based in London, who reconnected with his great-uncle during an extended stay in Japan in 1991, shortly before Iggy died.

The book is a curious mixture of quest narrative, provenance research, and the sentimental reconstruction of the lost worlds of gilded-age Paris and Vienna where the Ephrussi clan built up enormous wealth and high status. Despite those advantages – Charles Ephrussi was even awarded the Légion d’Honneur for services to art – the family, who were Dreyfusards, also remained exceedingly vulnerable to the insidious influence of entrenched anti-Semitism. The netsuke fill splendid vitrines in studies and libraries, first in the rue de Monceau (up the street from Moïse de Camondo, whose daughter Béatrice Reinach continued to ride in the Bois with pro-Nazi friends throughout 1940, so convinced was she that no one would ever arrest her, but who died with her husband and their two children in the camps),and subsequently in the even more palatial Avenue d’Iéna, interiors that make that of the Opéra feel monkish and austere. However, the handy thing is that netsuke collapse into a handbag, or can be indistinguishable from the lumps in a servant’s narrow mattress, which partly explains why powers as terrifying as the Gestapo were simply unable to prize them away from their rightful owners. This certainly makes one wonder about Manet’s Asparagus in Cologne, his Races in Chicago, Degas’s portrait of the general and the rabbi in the Hautes-Vosges, et cetera.

Beyond these narratives of rupture and continuity, there is the deft way in which the author evokes and distinguishes between the uses to which each successive generation put its collection of netsuke. Charles is the scholar–connoisseur, and has an actual role in creating, through the offices of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, the French enthusiasm for all things Japanese. The netsuke are for him part of the collecting mania. By contrast, Viktor and Emmy use them to entrance their children; they live in her dressing-room. Iggy decides to repatriate them, as, in a sense, does Juro, because to England the netsuke have at length returned (having spent the years 1945–47 there). They now make occasional solo excursions in the author’s pocket to the places where they once were kept, displayed, or hidden.

Emmy appears to have committed suicide at her estate near Kövecses in Czechoslovakia, in October 1938, shortly after Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland, at which point the new German frontier was barely twenty-two miles away. She was determined never to be a subject of the Reich. (Until the Anschluss, fresh flowers were brought weekly from Kövecses to fill the Palais Ephrussi.)

England and America are the unsung heroes in this tale of the displaced Ephrussi. In Tunbridge Wells, of all places, the widowed Viktor finds refuge and peace amid the ruins and remnants of the family business, while, for the first time in her life, his eldest daughter, Elisabeth, valiantly learns to cook, with the aid of advice carefully proffered in writing by former servants: ‘the honoured lady slowly tilts the frying pan.’ The German, French, and English-speaking Iggy eventually finds his way into the 7^th United States Army Corps as an intelligence officer – he was naturalised not long after the attack upon Pearl Harbor – and participates in the invasion of Normandy.

This book was powerfully resonant for me, because a single netsuke in the form of a sect of toadstools carved in exquisitely patinated boxwood lived for years in the corner cabinet in my mother’s sitting-room, and was tied by a silk cord to a broken inro with spidery gilded lacquer ornament. I suspect it came to her from her maternal grandparents, and presumably therefore travelled from Japan to London, then to Melbourne, Kilmany Park, near Sale in East Gippsland, then to Geelong, Berwick, and back to Melbourne again. Hardly the distinguished trajectory of the 264 Ephrussi netsuke, but a valuable reminder nevertheless that taste for Japanese art was global and exercised almost infinite reach in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Alas, I do not know what has happened to our single specimen, but no doubt Edmund de Waal will be sure to confer the temporary custodianship of his collection upon an appropriate representative of the next generation, just when the time is right.