Showa Period
Gouache, Pastel
Certified by the Tokyo Art Evaluation Committee
Frame Size: 47cm × 48.5cm
A Tribute to Nature and Life
Setsuko Migishi is known for her powerful and passionate paintings. Setsuko Mikishi lived in Veron, a rural village in Burgundy, France, and returned to Japan in her later years to establish a home and studio in Oiso, Naka-gun, Kanagawa Prefecture, where she painted.
This vibrant and emotionally charged work by Setsuko Migishi captures two birds beneath a brilliant red sun, rendered in bold, abstract brushstrokes. The vivid palette and dynamic composition evoke a profound sense of vitality and celebration of life — a recurring theme in Migishi’s oeuvre. The birds, nestled in a verdant forest, seem to dance in harmony with nature’s rhythm, embodying the joy and energy of the living world. This piece stands as a poetic tribute to the sun and the life it nurtures.
Setsuko MIGISHI
(1905 – 1999)
Setsuko Migishi was born in 1905 in Oshin-Nakajima, Orimachi, Nakajima District, Aichi Prefecture (now part of Ichinomiya City), into a wealthy family that operated a textile factory. She was the sixth of ten siblings (the fourth daughter). After graduating from Shukutoku Girls’ High School in Nagoya (now Aichi Shukutoku Senior High School), she persuaded her parents—who had encouraged her to study traditional Japanese painting—to allow her to pursue Western-style painting instead. She moved to Tokyo and studied under Saburōsuke Okada at the Hongo Western Painting Institute. Later, she transferred into the second year of Joshi Bijutsu Gakkō (now Joshibi University of Art and Design), graduating at the top of her class.
In 1924, she married the painter Kōtarō Migishi and gave birth to their son, Kōtarō Jr., in 1930. However, she lost her husband in 1934. Despite facing economic hardship, she chose not to evacuate during World War II and continued to paint, producing many still-life works in bright and vibrant tones.
In 1946, she co-founded the Women Artists Association (Joryū Gaka Kyōkai). In 1954, she traveled to France, where her son was studying, and later settled in Cagnes-sur-Mer in southern France in 1968, and in 1974, in the rural village of Véron in the Burgundy region. There, she traveled widely across Europe with her son, painting many outstanding landscapes. Even as she battled the loneliness of living in a foreign land and the physical decline that comes with aging, she continued to devote herself to painting.
She returned to Japan in 1989 at the age of 84 and continued her artistic work at her home and studio in Ōiso, Kanagawa Prefecture.
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