Peering into the eyes of the prophet
The Mormon world is abuzz with news of an astonishing discovery, and probably fans of the “Antiques Roadshow” TV franchise are pretty stoked, too. On Thursday, the leading newspapers in Utah and the Religion News Service reported that a descendant of Joseph Smith (18051844), the martyred American prophet of the Mormon faith, had discovered what is likely to be the first known photograph of Smith himself.
The find is explained in a new edition of the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal, a publication dedicated to the history of Mormonism and of its second-largest denomination, founded as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and today known as the Community of Christ. (Whitmer was one of the “eight witnesses” to Smith’s initial religious revelation and was the faith’s first church historian.)
The possibility that Smith had been photographed has long been acknowledged by specialists in Mormon history. The technology of the “daguerreotype,” which captures images on metal plates covered in silver halide, was discovered and popularized just early enough to cover the end of Smith’s life as the leader of a persecuted religious community, and there were stories that protophotos of the prophet had actually been taken.
Smith was lynched by a mob in Nauvoo, Ill., which proved to be the next-to-last stop on the Mormon journey to its present-day heart in Utah. The Mormon newspapers published in Nauvoo contain advertisements for photographic services, and one trained Mormon daguerreotypist, Lucian Rose Foster (1806-1876), was known to have met Smith and lived in his Nauvoo mansion. Nonetheless, throughout Mormon history, the main visual sources for the prophet’s personal appearance have been a death mask and a famous 1842 oil painting made by an unidentified, slightly amateurish hand.
Popular images of Smith in Mormon literature have leaned heavily on the painting, whose provenance is at least well established, even if its quality as a representation of Smith had been uncertain. You can probably guess that this hasn’t stopped Mormon historians from speculating at enormous length on the physical appearance of Joseph Smith, who was self-evidently a person of powerful charisma.
The purported new image turned up very unexpectedly at the home of Daniel Madison Larsen, whose maternal grandfather, Frederick Madison Smith, had been president of the breakaway “reorganized” Mormon church. Fred had succeeded his father — Joseph Smith III, the eldest surviving son of the prophet himself. When Larsen’s mother died in 1992, she handed down Smith family heirlooms to her own children. Larsen received the prophet’s monogrammed gold pocket watch, along with a second silver pocket watch with a broken release mechanism. Larsen couldn’t get the second watch open, so he set it aside, still closed.
In March 2020, Larsen was going through family property for an estate sale and spotted the long-forgotten silver watch. This time, he worked at it a little harder, and when he got the thing open, he discovered that it wasn’t a timepiece at all, but a locket depicting the face of a middle-aged man with light, piercing eyes and a black silk cravat. When he presented it to some historian friends involved in Illinois Mormon heritage preservation, the possibility quickly dawned on the trio that the little silvery image might be that of Smith.
It is not an open-and-shut case, if you’ll pardon the pun, but it appears to be fairly strong. There are no maker’s marks on the case of the locket, nor does it bear the imprint of its daguerreotypist, but chemical dating and analysis of daguerreotype technique puts the object firmly in the correct period. Study of Larsen family photographs show that the locket was probably passed down through, and worn in formal portraits by, female relatives of Smith. Other major candidates for the identity of the daguerreotype’s sitter have been ruled out.
A similar daguerreotype from the same period, also cut out in a circle, is known to have been taken of Lucy Mack Smith, mother of the prophet. Although the person in the locket does not look especially like the surviving oil painting of Smith taken from life, the two images have telling facial features in common, and forensic experts support the historians’ identification. The daguerreotype diverges from the painting most markedly in the nose, but Smith’s death mask had already given historians a hint that the nose in the painting was fishy.
In other words, a significant religion, thriving numerically and global in scope, may just have been given a previously unknown photographic image of its founder. It is enough to make the rawest of skeptics feel a frisson of awe. (The emergence of early photographs of significant historical figures is always a wondrous thing, but has anything of quite this sort ever happened?) As the Deseret News’s Trent Toone observes, discoveries of Smith photographs have been claimed before, but they fell flat quickly when subjected to scientific tests.
The church itself has released a statement saying, “We concur that the daguerreotype and locket were created of the materials and methods appropriate to the 1840s,” but adding that, “Nothing is definitively known about the locket’s history before 1992.” This is perhaps overcautious, considering that the locket changed hands between direct descendants of Smith along with his watch, but, after all, people have been murdered over fraudulent Mormon artifacts: the full official imprimatur of the church establishment will not be, and should not be, easily won.