Elder Brother and his Eldest Daughter

Elder Brother and his Eldest Daughter (兄とその長女) is a small 45.5 × 33 cm oil-on-canvas portrait painted by Migishi Kōtarō in 1924, when the artist was twenty-one. The sitter is Migishi's older half-brother Yamada Shintarō, the Sōdosha-era yōga painter associated with Kishida Ryūsei, shown half-length with his eldest daughter in his lap against a dark, tonally subdued ground. Yamada was the figure who had drawn Migishi from Sapporo to Tokyo three years earlier and through whom he had entered the Shun'yōkai (Spring Sun Society) exhibiting circle, so the choice of subject for what was effectively Migishi's emerging public debut carries autobiographical weight. The painting was exhibited at the second Shun'yōkai exhibition in 1924, where the Migishi submissions established him within Tokyo's non-academic yōga scene as a painter of unusual psychological subtlety. The handling — broad, slightly dragged brushwork, an earth-toned palette of browns and umbers, a flattened pictorial space — shows Migishi reading the early-Taishō Cézannist generation (Kishida Ryūsei, Yamada himself) but already pushing toward the patterned, slightly stiff figural mode that would distinguish his later work. The painting is in the collection of the Migishi Kōtarō Museum of Art, Hokkaidō, the prefectural museum that holds the largest single concentration of his paintings.