Letters to Camondo - Edmund de Waal (Signed)
De Waal, Edmund. Letters to Camondo. London: Chatto & Windus, 2021.
First edition. Signed by the author.
Companion study to The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010). A haunting sequence of imagined letters to the Count de Camondo – the owner of a spectacular Parisian palace filled with beautiful objects, turned into a memorial for his lost son. The Camondos were a Jewish family from Constantinople, “the Rothschilds of the East,” who made their home in Paris in the 1870s and became philanthropists, art collectors, and fixtures of Belle Époque high society, as well as being targets of antisemitism—much like de Waal's relations, the Ephrussi family, who lived only a few doors away. After de Waal, one of the world’s greatest ceramic artists, was invited to make an exhibition in the Camondo house, he began to write letters to Moise de Camondo. These fifty letters are deeply personal reflections on assimilation, melancholy, family, art, the vicissitudes of history, and the value of memory.
182 pp; colour + b/w illustrations. (ISBN: 9781784744311). As new in dust-jacket.