Hanako Coat (The muze of Auguste Rodin)

Inspired by Rodin's Japanese Muse, Hanako.

Rodin first met the Japanese actress Ohta Hisa, known as Hanako, at the 1906 Colonial Exhibition in Marseilles and invited her to pose for him in Paris. The following year, while engaged in a successful run at the Théâtre Moderne, Hanako made at least three visits to Rodin’s studio. The sessions resulted in numerous portraits, including this enigmatic drawing with the face and hands partially obscured by a semi-opaque layer of gray gouache. Perhaps dissatisfied with his first attempt, Rodin reprised the face in brown ink on the right. Both the simplified line drawing and the semi-effaced version of the portrait appear distinctly mask-like.

Ōhta Hisa (1868–1945), a Japanese actress known as Hanako (Little Flower), performed for several years in Europe in a troupe directed by Loïe Fuller (American, 1862–1928), a pioneer of modern dance. Rodin met Hanako in 1906 and was transfixed by her range of expression, producing multiple studies of her face in varying states of anguish, fear, and serenity. 

At the time Japanese art and artefacts were all the rage across Europe and America and most especially in Paris. Japonisme, as the craze was dubbed, transformed western visual arts, culture and design and inspired Art Nouveau among much else. The west was gripped by the delicacy and beauty of this mysterious culture.

Artists like Van Gogh, Monet, Manet and Toulouse Lautrec were inspired by the precision, line and extraordinary perspectives of Japanese woodblock prints. Fashionable women wore kimono and filled their homes with screens, fans, lacquerware, swords and blue and white porcelain. In London Arthur Lasenby Liberty opened his legendary shop on Regent Street, while in Paris Siegfried Bing purveyed Japanese goods from his shops in the Ninth Arondissement.

For the next twelve years, every summer ‘when the olive leaves began to brighten’, during the theatre off season, Hanako went to Rodin’s home in Val Fleury in Meudon in the Paris suburbs for three month’s vacation. She lived like a member of the family, with Lada, Rodin’s dog, sleeping in her room. Rodin gave her money if ‘he found [her] purse thin’ and showed her his many books of Japanese and Chinese art. In all he produced fifty three busts, masks and heads of Hanako, more than of any other sitter. There were even rumours that they were lovers.