Charles Ephrussi — art historian, collector and editor with roots in the Russian Empire
Charles Ephrussi was born in Odessa, then in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, on 24 December 1849. His grandfather, Charles Joachim Ephrussi (1793–1864), originally from Berdichev, had turned a small grain business in Odessa into one of the largest grain-exporting houses in the world; by 1860 the family was the world's leading exporter of wheat, and it moved into banking and the financing of railways and bridges. Charles's father, Leon, founded a bank in Odessa, while his uncle Ignace established the family's bank in Vienna.
Charles spent the first ten years of his life in Odessa before the family moved to Vienna. In 1871 he settled in Paris with his parents and brothers, in the newly built Hôtel Ephrussi at 81 rue de Monceau, in the district where several branches of the family lived. In 1891 he and his brother Ignace moved to a grander house at 11 avenue d'Iéna.
Rather than banking, Charles devoted himself to art. He published his first article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, France's leading art-historical periodical, in 1876, became its part-owner in 1885 and its editor in 1894, and wrote studies of Albrecht Dürer. He was an early collector and supporter of the Impressionists, buying works by Renoir, Monet, Morisot and Moreau, among others, and his likeness appears in paintings by Renoir and Degas. In the late 1870s, at the height of the Paris fashion for Japanese art, he bought a collection of 264 netsuke, small carved toggles, which he later gave as a wedding present to his cousin Viktor in Vienna.
Charles Ephrussi moved in the literary salons of Paris, where he knew Marcel Proust, and he is recognised as one of the models for Charles Swann in In Search of Lost Time. He died in Paris on 30 September 1905, aged fifty-five.
The netsuke survived the Second World War in Vienna and passed down through the family to the British potter and writer Edmund de Waal, whose memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) traces them, and the Ephrussis, from Odessa to Paris, Vienna and beyond. In 2018 de Waal placed 170 of the netsuke on permanent loan with the Jewish Museum Vienna.
"Spent his first ten years in Odessa, then moved with his family to Vienna and, in 1871, to Paris."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odessa, Kherson Governorate (now Ukraine)
Born in Odessa in 1849 into the Ephrussi family of grain merchants and bankers, he spent the first ten years of his life there, where his grandfather Charles Joachim had built the family's fortune, before the family moved to Vienna and then Paris.
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Odessa, Kherson Governorate (now Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.