Rare photos transport Springville patrons to Mormon pioneer life
George Beard’s photograph “Jackson Lake at Twilight,” circa 1920, is on display at the Springville Museum of Art.
George Beard's photograph "Two Women by a Stream," circa 1920, is on display at the Springville Museum of Art.
George Beard's photograph "George and Lovenia Beard," circa 1920, is on display at the Springville Museum of Art.
George Beard's photograph "Chalk Creek," circa 1920, is on display at the Springville Museum of Art.
George Beard's photograph "The First Utah State Legislature," circa 1896, is on display at the Springville Museum of Art.
George Beard's photograph "Creek," circa 1920, is on display at the Springville Museum of Art.
George Beard's photograph "Mountains Between Trees," circa 1920, is on display at the Springville Museum of Art.
A new exhibit at the Springville Museum of Art showcases the art behind art with rare photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, taken by a Coalville historical figure, George Beard.
Beard, who lived from 1854 to 1944, was an oil painter, among other roles as a civic and religious leader in Coalville, and used a bulky Tele-Photo Cycle-Poco camera (which he affectionately named “Alice”) to photograph the outdoors throughout Utah and other places in the West for reference material for his paintings.
The photographs have almost never been seen in public, except for in one exhibit at Brigham Young University in 1975, where the glass plate negatives have been stored since 1974.
Many of the photographs don’t look a day old. Looking at them is like stepping into a time machine.
And the photos themselves carry aesthetic value in and of themselves, according to curator Herman du Toit, who led the painstaking work of digital restoration for the new exhibit.
“I spent the time going through them, removing all the … scratches and abrasions and fly spots,” du Toit said. “Also some of George Beard’s thumb prints, I believe.”
du Toit was the Head of Museum Research at the BYU Museum of Art until his retirement in 2011 and has been taking photographs himself for 40 years. He said that Beard’s talent as a photographer is a revelation from the exhibit.
“He never regarded himself as a photographer, although he did study with Charles Savage, the renowned Utah photographer, and he used some important lessons from George Savage,” du Toit said. “Now we see that his photographs were at least of the same standard as other photographers who are more renowned than he is. That places him in their league, and I think that’s the important part of this exhibition, because for the first time, we see George Beard’s prowess as a photographer.”
du Toit’s background in printmaking proved useful in presenting the photographs in the best possible manner.
“If you look carefully at these photographs, you’ll see that they’re not just black and white photographs, they’re almost like prints,” du Toit said. “They’re printed on good quality printmaking paper.”
And the process of digital restoration also took expertise on du Toit’s part.
“One has to be really careful editing — you don’t want to distort the photographer’s image,” he said. “You don’t want to add to it, you don’t want to take away from it. What you want to do is you want to exemplify it. You want to actually present it in the very fashion that he would have regarded as the best print. As I worked with these images, I got a very clear impression of exactly what he was trying to do.”
Dr. Rita Wright, director of the Springville Museum of Art, said that the exhibit meets the goals of the museum in a number of ways.
“Primarily we advocate for Utah artists,” Wright said. “And Beard, we’ve had his oil paintings in the collection, and we’ve shared those throughout exhibitions (over) the years.”
And the exhibit has an educational aspect as well, showing the connections between the photographs and oil paintings, she said.
“I’m so interested in artists’ process, and that’s something we really educate to here, is looking how artists create, where their inspiration comes from, what kinds of things drive and influence them, to look at this connection between these very different media,” Wright said.
du Toit sees the photographs in the exhibition as being of the highest artistic value.
“When it comes to the artistic merit of these prints, they accord with the finest principles of black and white photography,” du Toit said. “(Beard) wasn’t just taking snapshots of photogenic images. He was trying to compose images that had a balance of light and shade — and he particularly liked clouds and he would wait hours to get a cloud to move into the right position, we have one of those shots in the exhibition — and then he would compose his picture often without two framing trees on either side and a receding stream. This was a compositional form that goes right back to Poussin and the early European painters, so he had almost a Classic approach to his compositions. Nothing is arbitrary, everything is carefully ordered.”
GEORGE BEARD: MORMON PIONEER ARTIST WITH A CAMERA
Where: Springville Museum of Art, 126 E. 200 South, Springville
When: Runs through June 17 during normal museum hours.
Admission: Free
Info: (801) 489-2727, smofa.org