Butterflies Crossing the Ocean

Butterflies Crossing the Ocean (海洋を渡る蝶) is a 120.5 × 82 cm oil on canvas painted by Migishi Kōtarō in 1934, one of the largest of the artist's final-year surrealist butterfly compositions. The painting shows a flock of butterflies in patterned flight above a pale, open seascape — an image of natural migration across an apparently endless horizon, treated with the Tanguy-like luminosity that characterizes Migishi's late style. The composition was painted following Migishi's spring 1934 visit to the entomologist Ino Genshirō in Tokushima Prefecture, where he made an extended study of butterflies; the title and motif may also reference the late-Edo image of the butterfly as a soul-form crossing into death, a reading that has acquired pathos in the light of Migishi's own sudden death in Nagoya in July of the same year. The painting belonged for many years to the collection of the Gōra Hotel in Hakone, where it hung in the dining room together with the related Loneliness on Journey of the same year, but the hotel's eventual closure and the dispersal of its art collection have left the painting's current location undocumented as of recent published surveys. The work survives in high-quality reproductions from the Kodansha 1963 monograph and from Japanese exhibition catalogues, and it remains among the most reproduced images of late-Shōwa yōga.