Hanako

Auguste Rodin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art