The Art of memory
Remembering Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes
Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes is a masterful excavation of history, art, and personal inheritance, told through the delicate yet weighty presence of a collection of Japanese netsuke. At its heart, the book is not just a family memoir but an investigation into how objects carry memory—how they survive, persist, and accumulate meaning as they pass through different hands.
For an artist and art teacher, especially one working outside their native culture, the themes of The Hare with Amber Eyes resonate profoundly. Teaching in Bangkok, at Wellington College, I find myself constantly aware of how art functions as both an inheritance and an act of translation. De Waal’s meticulous engagement with his family’s past—the Ephrussis, a once-great banking dynasty scattered by war—mirrors the way I (try) to approach my own teaching. In the classroom, I encourage students to see art as a carrier of history, something embedded with the fingerprints of time and touch.
De Waal’s writing, like his ceramics, is sculpted with patience and precision. His descriptions of the netsuke—tiny, intricately carved objects that once sat in Charles Ephrussi’s salon in Belle Époque Paris before surviving the ravages of the Anschluss in Vienna. In Bangkok, surrounded by gilded temples and a rich artistic heritage, I often find myself considering how objects retain their significance in different cultural contexts. Just as de Waal traces the journey of the netsuke from Edo-period Japan to modern-day London, I often see my students navigate their own inheritances, blending Thai, Western, Chinese, Burmese and contemporary influences in ways that feel both deeply personal and globally resonant.
There is also something inherently tactile about de Waal’s approach to storytelling—his desire to hold, to feel, to turn objects over in his hands. This is the same impulse that drives art education. The act of making, of handling materials, of learning through touch, is what connects us most viscerally to history. When de Waal describes running his fingers over a tiny hare with amber eyes, he is not just touching a carved figurine; he is touching the past. In the same way, when my students shape clay or layer paint, they are (I hope!) engaging in a dialogue with centuries and centuries of artistic tradition.
De Waal’s book is also about displacement, about the way objects and people are uprooted and recontextualized. As an English art teacher in Bangkok, I find echoes of this in my own experience. My students come from a range of backgrounds, and art becomes a means of exploring and reconciling different cultural identities. Just as de Waal’s netsuke move across continents, my students' works absorb influences from multiple traditions, often leading to unexpected and deeply meaningful expressions.
Ultimately, The Hare with Amber Eyes is a meditation on what we pass down and what is lost along the way. For an art teacher, it reinforces the idea that art is not just about creation but about preservation—about the ways we hold onto meaning, shape it, and send it forward into new hands. De Waal’s journey through memory and materiality reminds us that the smallest objects can carry the weight of history, just as the seemingly ephemeral act of making and teaching art can become an enduring bridge between past and future. well, we live in hope!
