Handcart Pioneers 1935

“Of the dozens of murals Teichert placed in public buildings in Utah during this era, none was funded through the WPA, and all of them were "removable." Nearly all had western themes, including many variations on the subject of the handcart pioneers. In 1935 the Mormon Church commissioned a large vertical painting of this theme for the President''s Suite in the Hotel Utah. Nearly twelve feet high, the mural later hung in Salt Lake''s Hotel Temple Square. This work portrays a pageant procession of figures pushing into a Rocky Mountain backdrop. The decorative composition includes blue-green patches of color on the stony ground and green bushes against red hills in the background. One bright note of color is the long Paisley shawl covering the figure of a pioneer woman seen from behind. The shawl drapes the figure in the mode of shawls worn by stylish women in fashion plates of the mid-nineteenth century. The line of figures in this painting gives some idea of what the composition might have been like for another Teichert handcart painting of the following year. Called Hand Cart Parade, it was exhibited in 1936 in the First National Exhibition of American Art at the International Building at Rockefeller Center in New York. The governor of Wyoming selected five artists, including Teichert, to represent his state in the exhibition that included work by artists in all forty-eight states that then comprised the Union.” Reproduced from the artist''s original artwork of Oil on Canvas 99” x 84”. Painted 1935. Reference: Minerva Teichert: Pageants in Paint by Marian Ward