Recognizing Faces: Women’s Portraits on the Salt Lake City and County Building

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Diana Lauritzen and Dr. James Swensen, Department of Art History and Curatorial Studies

Sixteen women’s portraits grace the capitals of four piers at the two main entrances to the Salt Lake City and County Building, a building which though controversial at the time, serves today as the icon of the city’s logo. Much like the details on the sandstone from which they were carved, their names have disappeared with time and only so much can be restored. My paper, which I presented as my senior thesis on April 6, 2012 at the BYU Museum of Art, explored who these women were, why they merited a prominent position on the building, and what their positioning said about the Mormon woman’s place in American society according to a non- Mormon perspective in the late 19th century.

The symbolism of the sixteen portraits varies as to who is or was the recipient of their message. Whereas to some extent the portraits simply follow the building’s Richardsonian Romanesque program, they also bear physical resemblance to real women whom I identified by comparing photographs to their portraits. In my research I found further that their facial expressions followed Charles Le Brun’s “Tetes d’Expression,” which means that each portrait’s expression represented a specific emotion.1 As I researched the biography of Matilda Therlkill for example, I found that although photographs for comparison are non-existent, the expression of “fright” on her portrait symbolized her experience as the first settler in the valley to lose a child (figs.1&2). For other women, such as Jane Manning James and Catherine Campbell Steele, their expression was not as important as the group they represented. Jane’s portrait represented all of the African American Utahns and her biography disproved several rumors about Mormon women held in the United States at the time. 2 Catherine represented herself as the mother of the first white child born in the valley, but also the women who came with the Mormon Battalion’s sick detachments.

Catherine’s name could not be matched with a portrait until I found an archived photograph of her descendant Patricia Culverwell holding a photograph of her grandmother’s stone portrait proudly next to her.3 After contacting Patricia, and the Daughters of Utah Pioneers I came to find that though Patricia’s chapter of the DUP knew at that time about the portraits, how they knew about the portraits is—to my knowledge—undocumented. Nevertheless, each pioneer woman’s portrait is more than a mask on a pillar, and their layered meanings are inseparable from the women’s biographies.

The claim that a portrait of one woman could represent a group of women was verified when I found Augusta Joyce Cocheron’s book Representative Women of Deseret. Published a decade previous to the building’s completion, the book highlighted prominent Mormon women whose biographies represented the values of the women’s organizations they headed. Unlike Cocheron’s book however, the women of the Salt Lake City and County Building were not contemporary to their time, and they were not chosen by a Mormon to represent Mormons.

Though the commemorative nature of the building was evidence enough that the portraits followed a tradition, their positioning on the building was telling of how the non-Mormon government was responding to the national opinion of Mormons so salient at the time. Commenced a year after the polygamy was halted and dedicated two years before statehood, the artistic decision of how to represent the Mormon people was a ponderous one. Their prominent position at the doorway represented the Mormon contribution to Utah’s history while the size and detail of the portraits reaffirmed that the government building was certainly not a Mormon building.

The sixteen portraits recognizing pioneer women bring out the fact that roughly ninety-five of the first four hundred-forty pioneers to enter the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 were women or girls. Yet, unfortunately, not only is little known about them, but photographs for comparison are-non- existent.Though I secured the identity of Harriet Wheeler Young, Clara Decker Young, Ellen Sanders Kimball, Jane Manning James, Matilda Therlkill, and Catherine Campbell Steele’s portraits, much more historical research regarding the fifty women who came with the sick detachments and the forty-two women who came with the Mississippi Company is left to be done in order to identify the eight women whom I could not. The portraits recognize the significance of these women and their symbolic associations despite the way history has forgotten them.

References

  1. Though I noticed the pattern of facial expressions, it was my Senior Thesis instructor, Heather Belnap Jensen who suggested I compare them to Charles Le Brun’s work.
  2. Jane Manning James’ photograph is owned by the LDS Church History Library and can be accessed through the Harold B. Lee Library’s database. Her likeness is found on the building’s west façade, south pier facing east.
  3. This photograph and three other photographs secured the identity of four women’s portraits. The copyrighted photographs may be accessed through these URLs: http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/USHS_Class&CISOPTR=20147&CISOBOX=1& REC=1 (Catherine Campbell Steele and Patricia Culverwell) http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/USHS_Class&CISOPTR=20146&CISOBOX=1& REC=14 (Clara Decker Young and Jeanette Judd) http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/USHS_Class&CISOPTR=20148&CISOBOX=1& REC=16 (Ellen Sanders Kimball and Connie Seegmiller) http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/USHS_Class&CISOPTR=20149&CISOBOX=1& REC=17 (Harriet Wheeler Decker Young and Delores Anderson)