Hayashi Takejiro
A Western-style painter who taught art in Sapporo from the Meiji era into the early Showa period. His "Morning Prayer," showing a family at prayer, is regarded as an early masterpiece among oil paintings made in Hokkaido.
Hayashi Takejiro was born in Miyagi Prefecture in 1871 and was baptized as a Christian while studying at a normal school in Sendai. He then went to Tokyo to study at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and in 1898 moved to Sapporo as a teacher at the Hokkaido Normal School. Two years later he began teaching drawing at Sapporo Daiichi Middle School (now Sapporo Minami High School), where he stayed for 28 years.
Many of his pupils went on to careers in art, among them the sculptor Nakahara Teijiro. He took middle-school students in as boarders at his home in Sapporo, and Migishi Kotaro, who lived nearby, is said to have frequented the Hayashi house as well. He is named as an educator who laid the foundations of art in Hokkaido. After leaving Sapporo Daiichi Middle School he went on teaching at schools such as Fuji Girls' School and Hokusei Girls' School, and at his Sapporo church he served as an elder, leading the congregation.
His best-known work, "Morning Prayer" (1906), was accepted to the first Ministry of Education Art Exhibition (Bunten) in 1907. In his last years he moved to Kagoshima to be with his son, Hayashi Fumio, who worked as a doctor at a leprosy sanatorium, and he died there in 1941. "Morning Prayer" is held by the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art.
