Minerva Teichert:

Minerva Kohlhepp was just four when her mother, a strong and creative woman, gave her a set of watercolors. From that moment, the child considered herself an artist. Everywhere she went, young Minerva carried a sketchpad and charcoal or pencil.

Born on 28 August 1888 in North Ogden, Utah, Minerva was the second of ten Kohlhepp children. Most of her early years were spent on her family’s Idaho homestead. The Kohlhepp family was poor financially, and with no school nearby, Minerva had little formal education as a small child. But each night her father gathered the children around to read the scriptures or classics of literature.

Minerva left home for the first time at age fourteen to work as a nursemaid for a wealthy Idaho family in San Francisco. There she saw museum art for the first time and attended classes at the Mark Hopkins Art School. But it was not until she had graduated from high school back home and taught school for several years that she was able to pursue any serious training in art.

By age nineteen, she had saved enough money to go to Chicago, Illinois, where she studied at the Chicago Art Institute under the great John Vanderpoel. Several times during her three-year course she had to go home to earn more money by working in the fields or in the classroom. But Minerva always returned to her studies. With characteristic confidence, Minerva once confronted Mr. Vanderpoel, asking why he criticized her work so harshly when so many classmates were doing much poorer work. She later recalled, “I shall never forget the disappointment on the man’s face when he answered in a choked voice, ‘Can it be possible you do not understand; those other students are not worth it, they will eventually leave school, but you—ah, there is no end’” (“Miss Kohlhepp’s Own Story,” Pocatello, Idaho, 1917).

By 1912, she had finished her course at the Art Institute and returned west to earn more money. During this period she was courted by two young men—calling off a wedding with one wealthy suitor when she learned that he didn’t want to be married in a Mormon church. The other young man, not a Church member either (she knew no Latter-day Saint young men), was Herman Teichert. Herman was a gentle cowboy whose favorite activity was chasing wild horses on the desert by moonlight. In April 1915, however, she left Herman behind, telling him to marry someone else, and went to the Art Students’ League in New York City.

At the time, the League was one of the most important art centers in the world. Minerva paid for the privilege of studying there in a variety of ways, including sketching cadavers for medical schools and performing rope tricks and Indian dances.

At this critical point in her life, Minerva had two experiences that took her out of the art world. The first experience crystallized her desire for life with a family—specifically, for life with Herman. In a testimony meeting she was listening to a sister speak on the joys of marriage and motherhood. “I thought of all the men I had met in my search for ‘the right one,’” wrote Minerva later. At that moment, she realized that “back on the Idaho desert, herding his cattle and branding his calves was a man more nearly meant for me than anyone else in the world” (unpublished autobiographical sketch, 1937, transcription from handwritten manuscript). Never one to doubt her own judgment, Minerva returned home to Idaho and married Herman.

The other experience helped her to strengthen her feeling that she had a mission as an artist and that she should place her art in the service of her faith. Minerva later recorded how Robert Henri, one of her renowned teachers, asked her, shortly before she left New York, whether any artist had ever told the “great Mormon story.”

“Not to my liking,’ I answered. ‘Good Heavens, girl, what an opportunity. You do it. You’re the one. That’s your birthright. You’ll do it well.’

“I felt that I had been commissioned” (unpublished manuscript, 1947).

Minerva Teichert spent the rest of her life, and her enormous vitality, answering these two callings—one to love and serve her family, the other to tell the story of her people and her faith through her art.

When Herman returned from serving in France during World War I, he and Minerva moved to the old Teichert family homestead in Idaho. Minerva loved this place, but they were eventually forced to leave by the construction of a new reservoir. They made their new home on a cattle ranch at Cokeville, Wyoming. Minerva painted scenes of the Idaho countryside around their old home in a frieze for the living room of their new home. For more than forty years, this room was both Minerva’s studio and the center of the Teichert household. She cooked meals on a wood-burning stove, occasionally adding a touch to a painting as she cooked. Every night while the family ate supper, she read to them—literature, history, and the scriptures.

In that same living room she developed a strong, original style as she painted hundreds of murals, portraits, and other works. The conditions were far from ideal for painting. The room was too small to spread out her larger murals. She sometimes had to fold the canvas, painting one section at a time. To see her murals in perspective, she would look through the small end of a pair of binoculars. Distractions were constant. But somehow Minerva persisted. “I must paint,” she once explained (unpublished manuscript, 1947).

Minerva’s spiritual life was guided by dreams and by an increasing ability to rely on the Lord. As a young mother, she turned down an opportunity to study in London, England, with her great teacher Robert Henri when she dreamed of a daughter who would soon be born to her. Laurie, the only Teichert daughter, was born with the next year or so. In the same way, Minerva saw future daughters-in-law in dreams before she met them. She trusted implicitly what she felt the Lord had told her and taught her children and grandchildren to rely on His guidance.

One of the highlights of her spiritual life was Herman’s baptism in 1933. He had supported her Church participation and paid tithing for years. Minerva and Herman were later sealed in the Logan Temple.

Minerva Teichert’s mission in art had two crowning points. One was the completion of the Book of Mormon mural series. She had felt that having the series published by the Church would be the ultimate fulfillment of her mission as an artist. When she could interest no one in publishing the paintings, she was devastated and eventually donated them to Brigham Young University.

But if the reception of the Book of Mormon murals was one of her life’s greatest disappointments, her commission to paint murals in the world room in the Manti Temple was one of its great satisfactions. In 1947, at the age of fifty-nine, Minerva Teichert and an assistant completed the murals in just a few months, a remarkable example of her almost unimaginable vitality.

By her death in 1976 at the age of eighty-seven, Minerva Kohlhepp Teichert had created perhaps as many as a thousand pieces of art. “Eternity seems very real to me,” she wrote in 1937. Then, expressing her eternal wish: “I want … to be able to paint after I leave here. Even though I should come back nine times I still would not have exhausted my supply of subjects and one life time is far too short but may be a schooling for the next.