The doll of the Empreror

Today’s style of display was developed during the early 17th century during the Edo Period, when Japanese society enjoyed 300 years of peace and prosperity after a time of civil war, and even ordinary people could obtain dolls and household miniatures.

The dolls tend to survive over time, so each set reflects the fashion of its era, and often reveals much about the history of Japanese folklore. At the birth of a daughter, a family would begin to make the  miniature household goods, Dogu, models of goods that would be part of her wedding dowry.

Evangeline Johnson Zalstem-Zalessky (lower right, in a later photograph) in 1924. The frame at the upper left holds memorabilia of her service with the American Red Cross.

Photographs courtesy of the family.

The Yale Peabody Museum received this collection of Hina Matsuri in 1955 from Evangeline Johnson Zalstem-Zalessky (1897–1990), daughter of Robert Wood Johnson, co-founder of the Johnson & Johnson. A collector of modern art and anthropological artifacts, she traveled and collected worldwide with each of her three husbands — the renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski, Russian nobleman and student of tropical agriculture Prince Alexis Zalstem-Zalessky, and Charles Merrill, an editor at The Arts in Ireland magazine. Well-known in museum circles, she ultimately donated many of her prizes to the Yale Peabody Museum, the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.