In 1931, a newspaper ran a photo of a Minerva Teichert painting that depicts Latter-day Saint pioneers rejoicing as seagulls eat the crickets destroying a field of crops. The central figure is a bearded man, his arms outstretched. Other people kneel around him in the field, giving thanks to God.
It’s a story that Teichert painted more than once in her career; one of her best-known paintings, “Saved by Seagulls,” depicts a similar scene of gratitude and joy.
But art historians were stumped by this specific seagull painting with the bearded man. The newspaper photo proved it existed, and letters from Teichert’s agent indicate that Teichert likely tried to sell it. But there was no record of what became of the painting itself.
Then in 2021, during the process of cleaning and restoring “Saved by Seagulls,” art conservation specialists took infrared photos of the piece — and discovered remnants of a previous work beneath the paint. The lines and shapes matched that of the 1931 newspaper photo. The missing Teichert painting was found.
“What we had never really paid attention to, or certainly I had never paid attention to, is that the figures on the left side of this newspaper image ... lined up with the figures [in ‘Saved by Seagulls’],” said Laura Paulsen Howe, art curator for the Church History Museum.
“Saved by Seagulls” sold in 1937, Howe continued, meaning Teichert must have painted over the image of the bearded man sometime before then. “We don’t know the context for why [she painted over it],” Howe said, but this discovery was “really exciting.”
The “Saved by Seagulls” conservation story was one of several that Howe shared on Thursday, May 23, at the Church History Museum.
She was joined by Shiree Roberts, conservation supervisor at the Church History Library, for an Evening at the Museum forum titled, “Peeling Back the Paint: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Recent Preservation Treatments of the Paintings of Minerva Teichert.” Roberts was a Church History Museum conservator when the museum’s Teichert exhibit — “With This Covenant in My Heart: The Art and Faith of Minerva Teichert” — opened in July 2023.
The free exhibit features 45 original Teichert paintings and is available for viewing until July 27.
Howe said the Church History Department takes seriously the charge to collect, preserve and share stories of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The challenge of a museum display, however, is that it often requires a balance between “preserve” and “share.”
“Sometimes that can feel like a friendly tug-of-war between experts,” Howe said. “Conservators want to make sure items last, and curators want to make sure items are seen. But I think Shiree would agree [that] working together to find the balance between those two things is deeply satisfying.”
Conservation efforts
Teichert (1888-1976) found time to paint while raising a family with her husband on a cattle ranch in Cokeville, Wyoming, Church News previously reported. She was also involved in her community, loved learning, studying scriptures and doing family history work.
As a muralist, she painted stories of the Savior, the Restoration of the gospel, Old Testament themes like the gathering of Israel, Book of Mormon narratives and stories of the western United States, including indigenous peoples and 19th century settlers.
She created between 300 and 400 pieces of art in her lifetime. An exact number isn’t known because a full catalog doesn’t exist.
The Church was a major patron of Teichert’s works in the 1930s and 1940s. Due to the efforts of her friend and agent Alice Merrill Horne, Teichert’s works have been displayed in Latter-day Saint meetinghouses and in other church buildings, such as the Lion House in Salt Lake City, city tabernacles across the state of Utah and the Manti Utah Temple world room.
Unfortunately, some of those locations subjected Teichert’s paintings to more wear and tear than others. For example, “Madonna of 1847″ hung for decades in reach of school children at South Cache High School, which later became South Cache Middle School; and “Not Alone” hung in a church gymnasium before it was restored and placed in the Pocatello Idaho Temple.
During the May 23 event, Howe and Roberts detailed the ways that art conservation groups helped restore Teichert’s paintings.
For “Madonna of 1847,” Roberts said one of the biggest challenges was determining if various graphite marks were Teichert’s or the graffiti of schoolchildren. Teichert’s pencil sketches are sometimes visible through her thin paint layers, and she sometimes added graphite lines over paint, according to the Church History Museum’s website.
“Madonna of 1847″ was also suffering from tenting paint (when paint begins detaching from the canvas, creating peaks along the artwork’s surface), paint loss near the frame edges and small holes in the canvas from staples, among other issues. Roberts explained that after cleaning the painting, art conservators fixed the tenting by using heat and adhesive to press the paint flat. They then applied the painting to a new backing and filled in paint loss.
“We’ve got to respect the artist when we do these things, as much as we can,” Roberts said, adding that “hundreds” of painstaking hours went into preserving Teichert’s paintings.
In the case of “Not Alone,” Howe said an eight-person team took down the 7.5-feet-by-9.5 feet painting — and then it wouldn’t fit through the door until they removed the frame. Art conservators later treated tenting paint, scraped a wax resin adhesive off the back and attached the piece to a new backing.
For more art conservation stories about Teichert’s paintings, see the “Conservation Stories” section of the Church History Museum’s website.
Preserving the artist’s vision
Howe emphasized that everything curators and conservationists do is intended to preserve the artist’s original vision.
In her role as a curator, this means researching the artist’s techniques as much as possible. For example, what kind of paint did they use? Did they like or dislike varnish? What materials did they prefer?
“So that will become the curator’s job, to dig in and figure out that information so that when we’re making choices about how... we conserve a piece, we’re doing our level best to do it as Minerva would want it done,” Howe said.
Roberts added that art conservators come from a variety of backgrounds, usually a combination of art, art history, archeology, anthropology and the hard sciences, particularly chemistry. While it’s difficult to predict how long any given conservation job will last, the hope is that each piece will gain at least another 50 years of life.
“[Conservationists] learn how to pull skills and tools from all those source fields to preserve cultural heritage materials for the future,” Roberts said.
Howe ended by expressing her gratitude for the opportunity to share Teichert’s life, faith and art.
Thanks to the dedicated efforts of conservation firms working with the Church History Department, “these paintings and these stories will be around to inspire future generations for a very long time,” she said.
