Precious Works of Art

Between 1907 and 1912, Auguste Rodin produced more than fifty sculpted portraits of the Japanese-born actress Ota Hisa, best known by her stage name, Hanako (“flower child” or “little flower”). Rodin's perceptions of Hanako were filtered through Japonisme, a critical and aesthetic discourse that posited affinities between Japanese and French art. When Hanako arrived in France in 1906, she was billed as “the most illustrious actress in Japan,” the leader of a troupe from the Tokyo Imperial Theater, and a descendant of the illustrious Danjuro family of kabuki actors. Hanako's performances at the 1906 Exposition Coloniale, which might seem to frame her as an ethnographic spectacle, bore a complex relationship to the Exposition's ideological framework. In January 1925, the Gifu Daily News published a serialized interview with Hanako under the title “A Precious Work of Art: The Story of Ohana-San Who Was Born in Gifu and Became a Model for Rodin.”