Suburban in Sapporo

Suburban in Sapporo (札幌郊外) is a 35 × 43.5 cm oil on canvas painted by Migishi Kōtarō circa 1927 during one of his return visits to his birthplace from Tokyo. The composition shows a low-keyed view of fields and scattered houses at the edge of Sapporo, rendered in the cool palette — greys, ochres, muted greens — that Migishi adopted for his Hokkaidō landscapes and that distinguishes them from the warmer-toned Tokyo studio interiors of the same period. The painting belongs to a small group of Sapporo and surrounding-area landscapes from the mid-to-late 1920s in which Migishi worked through the post-impressionist landscape vocabulary of the Shun'yōkai circle and applied it to the cold light and long horizons of his northern birthplace. He had grown up in Sapporo as the second son of Migishi Eitarō and the painter Mineji, and his return trips home during the Tokyo years produced both Hokkaidō landscapes like this one and a series of family portraits. The painting entered the collection of the Hongō Shin Memorial Museum of Sculpture in Sapporo, a Hokkaidō-based regional museum, and remains there as one of the most important survivals of Migishi's earlier Sapporo work.