ABSTRACT
In Mormonism's most sacred spaces, landscape painting expounded the theology of nature as a progressive series of divine realms, all interconnected, all perfect in the measure of their intended purpose. Latter-day Saints understood the United States as having both a scriptural past and a divine destiny, as the setting of the Book of Mormon's history and also as the millennial promised land. Lambourne extended the metaphor by painting the hill at daybreak, symbolizing Smith's restoration of the Book of Mormon as dispersing the clouds of confusion that had mired apostate Christianity. From the beginning of settlement, Mormon artists celebrated this transformation in a host of landscape paintings representing fertile cultivated valleys against the backdrop of the surrounding wilderness. A painting by Ottinger reveals how Mormon settlers understood the dichotomy between wilderness and settlement through human as well as natural subjects.
