Edmund de Waal — ceramic artist and writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Edmund Arthur Lowndes de Waal was born in Nottingham on 10 September 1964, the son of Victor de Waal, then a university chaplain and later Dean of Canterbury, and the historian Esther de Waal, née Lowndes-Moir. His paternal grandfather, Hendrik de Waal, was a Dutch businessman who had moved to England. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his father's mother, Elisabeth de Waal, née Ephrussi.
Elisabeth was born in Vienna in 1899, the eldest child of the banker Viktor von Ephrussi, who had been born in Odessa in 1860, and of Emmy Schey von Koromla. Viktor's father, Ignace von Ephrussi, was born in Berdichev in 1829 and moved from the family's Odessa grain house to Vienna in 1857 to found its bank; Ignace's father, Charles Joachim Ephrussi, had made the family one of the largest grain exporters in the world. The Russian-born generation of Edmund's line is thus his great-grandfather, and the one before it. After the annexation of Austria in 1938 the family lost its property in Vienna; Elisabeth settled in England, where she later wrote novels; her first, The Exiles Return, was published in 2013, long after her death.
De Waal trained as a potter in the English tradition of Bernard Leach, spent time in Japan in the early 1990s and from 1993 worked in London. He became known for installations of thin-walled porcelain vessels set in vitrines and architectural spaces, often made in response to museum collections and archives, and has exhibited at Chatsworth, Kettle's Yard, Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, among others.
In 2010 he published The Hare with Amber Eyes, which follows a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke bought in Paris in the 1870s by his great-grand-uncle Charles Ephrussi, given to Viktor and Emmy in Vienna as a wedding present, hidden through the war and inherited by Edmund from his great-uncle Ignace. The book won the Costa Book Award for Biography and the Ondaatje Prize, was translated into many languages, and later received the Windham–Campbell Prize. It was followed by The White Road (2015), on the history of porcelain. In 2018 he placed 170 of the netsuke on permanent loan with the Jewish Museum Vienna. He was appointed OBE in 2011 and CBE in 2021.
"His Ephrussi ancestors moved from Berdichev to Odessa and, from 1857, to Vienna and Paris; his grandmother Elisabeth left Vienna after 1938 and settled in England."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odessa (great-grandfather Viktor von Ephrussi, born 1860) and Berdichev (great-great-grandfather Ignace), Russian Empire
His father's mother, Elisabeth de Waal, was the daughter of the Viennese banker Viktor von Ephrussi, who was born in Odessa in 1860, and the granddaughter of Ignace von Ephrussi, born in Berdichev in 1829 — the family of Odessa grain merchants whose history he told in The Hare with Amber Eyes.
Great-great-grandfather Ignace von Ephrussi (born Berdichev 1829); great-grandfather Viktor von Ephrussi (born Odessa 1860); grandmother Elisabeth de Waal, née Ephrussi (born Vienna 1899).
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Odessa (great-grandfather Viktor von Ephrussi, born 1860) and Berdichev (great-great-grandfather Ignace), Russian Empire. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.