The ceramicist Edmund de Waal’s bestselling family memoir The Hare with the Amber Eyes tells the story of the Ephrussi dynasty’s fortunes throughout 19th and 20th-century Europe, from fabulous wealth, connoisseurship and cultural prestige to antisemitism, Nazi persecution and the dispersal of the family across three continents.

It is a book in which family, art, belonging and the meaning of collecting are all central themes, inspired by De Waal’s inheritance of a collection of netsuke (miniature Japanese carvings) that miraculously survived the Nazis’ looting of the family home in 1930s Vienna.

De Waal’s new exhibition at Waddesdon Manor, the Rothschild estate in Buckinghamshire, shares many of these themes. The Rothschilds were peers of the Ephrussi family and related through marriage. Like the Ephrussis, they collected a huge amount of fine art, furniture and ceramics, as the opulent interiors of Waddesdon (donated to the National Trust in 1957) reveal.

Waddesdon invited De Waal to install his distinctive, minimalist ceramics in locations throughout the house.

In these short videos, the artist explains his approach and draws out the common threads between this project and The Hare with the Amber Eyes, focusing on five of the 12 installations he has created.

Interviews by Emma Crichton-Miller, who writes about the exhibition in the forthcoming Summer 2012 edition of RA Magazine.

Amy Macpherson is the RA Website Editor.