The exhibition of John Hafen’s work at the Springville Museum of Art is quietly beautiful: pastoral landscapes float in soft tonal harmonies; fields, trees, and distant hills seem to belong to a quieter century. The paintings are assured and accomplished, the work of an artist clearly in command of his craft. But more than pretty pictures, they trace the making of an artist—his ambitions, frustrations, and hard-won growth—while quietly raising larger questions about what it meant to pursue art in a place that had not yet decided whether art itself was necessary.

John Hafen arrived in Utah in 1862 as a child immigrant from Switzerland and came of age in a territory where professional art barely existed as a viable path. His earliest instruction came through the informal networks that sustained art along the Wasatch Front in the late 19th century, studying drawing and painting with local artists including Danquart Weggeland, one of Utah’s first academically trained painters, and later working alongside artists connected to the emerging art program at Brigham Young Academy. But training opportunities remained limited, and artistic work alone could not provide a living. Hafen supported himself through a succession of practical occupations—house painting, sign painting, decorative work, and photography—turning to fine art whenever time and finances allowed. Yet he possessed an unusual degree of conviction. Determined to become a serious artist, Hafen helped advance what would become the most consequential decision of his early career: an audacious proposal that he and several fellow artists would take directly to leaders of the LDS Church.

In the summer of 1890, the LDS Church agreed to send a small group of young Utah artists to Paris to study painting. The idea originated with the artists themselves. With church support, they would travel to Europe, receive academic training unavailable in Utah, and return prepared to complete the long-awaited murals of the Salt Lake Temple.

The timing was striking. Throughout the 1880s, federal authorities had intensified their campaign against the LDS Church and its practice of plural marriage. Church leaders were arrested and imprisoned; others disappeared into hiding to evade federal marshals. The Edmunds–Tucker Act of 1887 dissolved the church as a legal corporation and authorized the seizure of its property, placing even sacred spaces under potential threat. In May 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the legality of those seizures. Only weeks later, in July, Hafen and his fellow artists quietly boarded an eastbound train.

Polymarket didn’t exist in 1890, but its logic did. Watching a financially embattled church make an expensive cultural investment in Paris art training during a period of property seizures and leadership persecution, one might read it as a clear signal: this institution expects to survive, and expects to own a temple. Three months after the artists departed, Wilford Woodruff published the Manifesto of September 1890, announcing the end of official authorization of new plural marriages and reshaping the future of the church. The art mission, in retrospect, was one of the earliest legible signs that accommodation—and survival—had already been chosen.

One of the quiet pleasures of the Springville exhibition is watching Hafen positioned on the threshold of that transformation. The gallery walls include works from before Paris—earnest, careful paintings that reveal both talent and limitation. His early works are slightly stiff. Figures hold their poses dutifully. Colors cluster around browns and shadowed greens. Everything feels carefully assembled rather than observed.

In Paris he encountered something different: painting built from light and color observed directly outdoors rather than constructed from dark outlines and studio conventions. Edges softened. Shadows became colored rather than black. Paintings could record experience rather than simply describe objects.

John Hafen, “A Garden Path”

The works upon his return show mountains receding into atmosphere instead of standing like stage scenery. Trees flicker with loose brushwork. Grass carries unexpected blues and yellows. Light organizes the composition as much as drawing. In a work like “Garden Path,” nothing dramatic happens: a narrow trail cuts through bright grass toward a simple wooden gate, trees filtering sunlight into shifting patches of color. Yet the painting holds attention precisely because of its quietness. Hafen had absorbed Impressionist ideas but adapted them to the subjects he knew: irrigation ditches, orchards, fenced fields, and modest garden paths.

One of the strengths of the exhibition is how plainly it shows Hafen settling into this new language. The mature works feel unforced, almost casual in their confidence. They are neither heroic Western landscapes nor overtly religious scenes. Instead, they occupy a middle ground that would characterize Utah painting for a generation or more: the cultivated landscape, shaped by human labor but not dominated by spectacle.

Scattered through the exhibition are paintings that extend this observation in a different direction—toward the leisure landscape emerging alongside the cultivated one. By 1900, resorts of all kinds dotted Utah’s canyons and lakeshores. The Utah History Encyclopedia counts nearly twenty on Utah Lake alone. The resort at Geneva on Utah Lake appears in more than one canvas. Lake Mary, the alpine lake at the head of Big Cottonwood Canyon, appears in another. It was not a remote alpine lake: the nearby Brighton Hotel was drawing thousands of summer visitors. These were signs of a society becoming less pioneer and more modern, less agricultural and increasingly urban. Hafen was attentive to this. The Impressionists he had studied in Paris were themselves drawn to the new leisure landscapes sprouting along the Seine. Hafen’s Utah equivalents are quieter; they were modest regional resorts, not drivers of a broader leisure economy. But the instinct is the same—an artist trained to notice where people gather in the light, watching his own society discover that it had time to rest.

A scene depicting the leisure activities that sprouted up along Utah Lake at the turn of the 20th century.

One corner in the exhibition complicates that picture productively. Set apart from the pastoral Utah scenes, it gathers a handful of works that look outward toward a different Utah: a red rock butte burning in desert heat, a tipi glowing in warm light against an open landscape, and a portrait of a Native American subject—direct, unheroic, painted with the same observational attention Hafen brought to his fields and orchards. The juxtaposition is quietly striking. These are not the subjects that defined his reputation or sustained his income. But their presence in the exhibition is a reminder that the landscape Hafen was learning to see was never empty. The Ute and Shoshone peoples had lived across this territory for generations; by 1900, tipi encampments near Salt Lake City were still a documented reality, as both peoples continued to travel, trade, and move through lands that reservation policy had claimed but not fully severed them from.

Installation view of John Hafen’s work in Springville Museum of Art’s “Enduring Beauty,” including from left: an Indian farm in Indianola, Utah (1897); a portrait of Hafen’s Springville neighbor, “Indian Jim” (1905); scene near St. George (1904); and “Teepee, North of Salt Lake” (1904).

In the Salt Lake Temple, Hafen, along with Edwin Evans and Dan Weggeland, painted the murals for the Garden Room—the lush green scenery depicting the Biblical Garden of Eden, appropriate to his skills and the Impressionist landscape training he had just completed. It was among the most significant commissions available to any Utah artist of his generation. But it provided prestige more than lasting financial security, and the broader market for his work remained stubbornly thin.

The conditions Hafen faced were common to virtually every artist working along the Wasatch Front. His own early mentors had barely survived. George Ottinger recorded that over eight years he had sold 223 paintings for a total of $3,415—barely $15 each. Danquart Weggeland, another of Hafen’s teachers, occasionally accepted hand-knitted socks or garden vegetables in exchange for lessons. C.C.A. Christensen supplemented his painting by decorating furniture, coffins, and flour bins. These were not failures of individual will but of infrastructure: Utah had no established collecting class, no gallery system, no inherited tradition of civic patronage.

The person who grasped this most clearly was Alice Merrill Horne—who had, among others, studied painting under Hafen himself. In 1898 she ran for the Utah state legislature on an explicit platform of arts support, arguing that the state’s artists must rely on “the great producing class for patronage”—meaning ordinary citizens, not wealthy elites. Her 1899 bill created the Utah Arts Institute, the first state-funded arts agency in the nation, with an annual purchase prize that would put public money directly into artists’ hands. It was a structural solution to a structural problem. But it arrived too late and too modestly to transform Hafen’s circumstances.

John Hafen, “Harvest Time Near Sugar House,” 1897

The Church itself provided some relief. From around 1901, it contracted with Hafen for a monthly retainer — $100 or more—in exchange for a set number of paintings, mostly landscapes and portraits of Church leaders. The arrangement gave him a floor he had never had before, and the works produced under it became the nucleus of what is now the finest existing collection of his paintings, held at the Museum of Church History and Art in Salt Lake City. But a retainer is not a market; it kept him working, not independent.

What Hafen could do—and did—was build. In 1881 he had helped found the Utah Art Association, one of the territory’s first organizations dedicated to exhibition and instruction. He agitated for the Paris mission that would connect Utah painting to the broader currents of European Impressionism and bring new ambition back to the Wasatch Front. Then, in 1903, after attending a lecture on art education in Provo, he walked home, lifted a painting from the wall of his studio, and carried it to Springville High School. “I will give this painting to the students of the Springville High School,” he said, “in the hopes that it will become the beginning of an art collection.” He then wrote to his friend Cyrus Dallin in Boston, encouraging him to do the same. Dallin sent a replica of his Paul Revere. The students, catching the spirit, began raising their own funds to add to the collection annually. What grew from those two donations—slowly, then decisively—was the Springville Museum of Art, Utah’s oldest visual arts museum and still one of its most important.

Hafen didn’t live to see it become that. He left Utah for the Brown County Art Colony in Indiana, where the landscape suited his Impressionist instincts and the regional art community offered something Utah still couldn’t quite provide—a market. Commissions came. He was invited to paint the governor’s portrait. He won first prize at the Illinois State Fair. His family, after years of separation while he traveled and painted and scraped, finally packed up and moved to Indianapolis to be with him. He had found, at fifty-four, the life he had been working toward. Five weeks after his family arrived, he died of pneumonia.

His body was brought back to Utah and buried in a Springville cemetery. The state he returned to was already different from the one he had left. The next generation of Utah artists—trained in schools and academies that partly owed their existence to what he and his contemporaries had built, exhibited in institutions seeded by his donations, connected to international currents through the precedent of the Paris mission—would find firmer ground to stand on. Hafen had helped lay it. He just never got to stand on it himself.

John Hafen, “Sunny Picutre (Morning Sunshine, Springville),” 1890, oil on canvas

Recent news articles have touted the number of people expected to attend the open house of the newly renovated Salt Lake Temple beginning in April, 2027. They won’t see Hafen’s murals. Or any murals. 
For several decades the Garden Room walls held—repaired here, touched up there, as water damage and the slow failure of lath and plaster took their toll. But across the mid-twentieth century, successive repaints layered over what remained of the original work. By 1987, a single small section of what Hafen, Evans, and Weggeland had rushed to complete for the 1893 dedication could still be identified as original. When President Russell M. Nelson announced in April 2019 that the temple would close for renovation, church officials indicated the existing murals would be cleaned and preserved, their colors emerging “brighter and more vivid” than before. Then, in March 2021, more than a year into the work, that plan was reversed. The endowment would shift to a filmed presentation, the progressive rooms reconfigured, and the walls themselves—too deteriorated to move and requiring seismic reinforcement—removed.

Whether structural necessity drove the outcome or provided cover for a decision already made is a question the public record cannot fully resolve. What is clear is that the paintings produced by that audacious 1890 investment — the art missionaries dispatched during the church’s most precarious political moment, the mission that shaped Hafen’s artistic life — outlasted their creators by barely a generation in any original form, and were gone entirely before the temple’s second century closed.

To see what that commission aspired to, what Hafen brought back from Paris and applied to those walls, you need to go to Springville.

Enduring Beauty: John Hafen and the Power of Art, Springville Museum of Art, Springville, through July 25.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.