In the 1880s in France boxes, no ship loads, of (very) artistic tat (bibilots) were arriving in France, and the author's great grandfather, Charles Ephrussi was up there collecting with the best of them, in this world of japonaise , salons, affairs and of course, Japanese porn (shunga -mainly sexually explicit prints, sometimes with fantastical creatures - he says that octopuses were often featured for their "sinuosity", by which I think he actually means having arms for every orifice at once ).
I begin to want to see some of the pictures he's talking about (and no, not just the porn, though that is worth a look, just type shunga into Google, but not perhaps at work. Shunga + octopus is weird - it's got a whole Wikipedia entry to itself). So there is this sumptuous picture of Manet's wife in Japanese costume, he wasn't just all muddy light and lilies then. I should say that I'm reading with a little Nexus 7 beside me, the poor man's iPad, so I can look up things whenever I want without that heavy shift of the body from reading chair / bed to desk and computer.
There's this real sense of the voluptuousness of fin-de-siecle Paris - the tapestries and hangings, the collections of gold laquered Japanese boxes, the salons. All of it dripping with money.
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