Lot 1112

In good condition consistent with age, with some marks, loose threads in seams under arms, a few marks to the base fabric.


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Jean-Pierre Hauchecorne, Paris
Piasa Auction House, Paris, 28 September 2022
Collection of Robert Bleakley

Son of Armand Hauchecorne, French consul in China then at Osaka and Kobé (1923-1937), and nephew of the Orientalist sculptor Gaston Hauchecorne, Jean-Pierre Hauchecorne born 8 Paris Rue Madame I February 12, 1908. After studies at Lycée Louis-le-Grand and military service, he joins his father in Japan in 1931 and becomes his secretary. In 1933, he then started his career as a professor of French at the Lycée Supérieur de Shizuoka, remaining until 1938.
One of his students, Yasuhiro Nakasune, will become Prime Minister , the two remained close friends. From 1938, he taught at the French-Japanese of Kansai while teaching at the same time at The Third Higher School of Kyoto from 1940 to 1943. During the war, he was imprisoned as were many other French. He was freed by the American occupying forces on 8th May 1945.
During this period, he saved the collections of his Italian Ethnologist Fosco Mainraini, then interned with his family in Nagoya's prison. In 1933, he married Hatsuko Odan, descended from an old Samurai family from the Région of Kobé, two children were born from this union, Francois in 1937 and Jacqueline, in 1942.
In the period from the 1950s to 19070s he travelled widely in Japan, meeting artists in the most remote villages, collecting prints, textiles; ceramics and baskets. Close to the Mingei movement, friend of the potters Kawai Kanjiro and Bernard Leach, the painter Serizawa, and in particular the Master of the Yuzen Moriguchi Kako. He published numerous articles in the Japanese press on these figures of the movement and on the crafts and popular traditions. At the same time, he awakened an appreciation of the Japanese arts and traditions to traveling foreigners including Olep Zadkine, André Malraux, Gérard Philippe and Jean-Louis Barroult who broke his tour to stay in his house in Nichiyama in Kyoto.
At the age of 71, Jean-Pierre Hauchecorne and his wife Hatsuko choose to return to France and settle close to their fomily near Montpellier , then at Nice where he remained until his death in November 1995 and his wife's in 2013.
This remarkable Ainu robe was the sole example in his collection which was sold by the Paris auction house Piasa Lot 1 28th September 2022.