A few days ago Keepa’ninny MDearest and I spent an afternoon at the Museum of Utah Fine Arts on the University of Utah campus. There is too much to take in during a single visit – we didn’t do justice to the rooms of objects from Egypt or sub-Saharan Africa or the Pacific or … or … or …, spending most of our time on this visit with the Central American figurines and in the gallery of Utah art and artists.

We saw this portrait by John White Alexander of the phenomenally popular Utah-born actress Maude Adams in one of her gender-bending roles as Napoleon II (she also played Peter Pan).

I liked Lee Greene Richards’ portrait of the “Breton Fisher Boy.”

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We spent a lot of time looking at James T. Harwood’s Préparation pour diner. This iPad snap doesn’t do justice to the effect of that bright white patch of sunlight on rough-textured wall, with the incredible shade of turquoise shadow cutting across it (nor, in contrast to the rough texture of paint on that rough wall, the exquisitely smooth and carefully worked softness of the woman’s face).

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I also liked this H.L.A. Culmer painting of the Salt Lake Valley. The curator’s label dates it “c. 1900,” but the presence of the Cathedral of the Madelaine and the mirror-twin Boston and Newhouse Buildings on Main Street force a date at least nine years later.

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And I kept going back to this Dan Weggeland painting. It’s fun – colorful and lively and detailed. Something about it wasn’t quite right, though, and I kept going back until I saw it.

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Dan Weggeland (Danquart Anthon Weggeland, 1827-1918) was one of Utah and Mormondom’s earliest best artists. He was born in Norway and began studying art in his youth. He met Mormon missionaries in 1854 – including the artist C.C.A. Christensen. Then he migrated gradually to Utah: first to England where he served as a missionary for three or four years, then, in 1861, to New York City where he studied for a few months with artists there. He arrived in Utah late in 1862.

He was not a financially successful artist – in Utah, in those days, that was still a practical impossibility. But he taught other artists, including those who were sent to France as art missionaries to enlarge their skill for working on murals in the temples. Weggeland himself worked on murals in St. George, Manti, Logan, and Salt Lake.

And one of his works was this painting of a group of campers, which the curator’s label identifies as “Campsite on the Mormon Trail, 1875. Music-making and merriment fill a moment of rest during the Mormon pioneers’ journey from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Salt lake City, Utah, in 1846 and 1847. This idealized image does not reflect the actual experience of the notoriously difficult trek.”

No, no, it does not. Nothing about it suggested Mormon pioneers, and that’s why I kept staring at it. So maybe he omitted the iconic oxen and covered wagons (there is a wagon, but it doesn’t look quite right). But nobody dressed that way on the trail – those are very fashionable, much-later-than-1847 dresses on a couple of young ladies with their parasols and their very-much-not-sunbonnets. That’s not a Mormon dancer in the pink and gold, either. And so many of the figures have much darker complexions than the usual depiction of Mormons. And what about that woman kneeling at the cooking fire, smoke wafting up from her tobacco pipe? And that’s a whisky bottle under the violinist’s stool, isn’t it?

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Any or several of these details might be part of a Mormon scene, I supposed, but all of them together? Something just wasn’t right …

And then something started bubbling up from some deep recess of my memory, an account I read once of a misidentified painting … I still haven’t recalled where I read it, and haven’t found it yet by Googling, but suddenly I realized that this was the painting in that barely-remembered memory. These were not Mormon pioneers, but a group of gypsies. (I’ve seen a number of 19th century Mormon accounts of gypsy caravans passing through Utah – they really did.) Now everything fit – the darker complexions, the un-pioneerish dancing and musical group, the pipe-smoking woman, the tents and the funny caravan in place of the ox-drawn covered wagons. And most of all, it was now obvious that that fashionably dressed group were young women having their palms read or their fortunes told by the stooped and elderly gypsy woman.

After coming home, and while trying to find what I had once read about the misidentified painting, I found a discussion of Utah artists in an 1886 newspaper. That account included this paragraph:

The Gypsies’ Camp

Our citizens will remember a party of Gypsies, who encamped near the outskirts of town a few years ago. Their brilliant costumes, as well as their peculiar modes of camp-life, were the subject of much comment. The artist saw in this picturesque people the material for a fine picture. He made a number of sketches of the more interesting groups, afterwards combining them into strikingly original work. Occupying the center of the picture is a group of gypsies, busy with preparing a meal over the embers of a camp fire. A group to the right really contains the focal interest. It is a couple of young ladies with their escorts, having their fortunes told by an old gypsy hag. Other figures each lending interest to the scene, make up the tout ensemble.

I can’t count this as my discovery – although I don’t remember where I learned about the misidentification, and can’t tell you when and how it occurred, it was a memory, not a deduction of my own.

And the reason it belongs here on Keepa is that the sense of something not being right, the not fitting, and the continuing to mull it over until the partial solution came, is that this is very much the thought process of evaluating written history – something that all readers do, or need to do, when faced with, say, family history that doesn’t quite fit. Pay attention to that nagging feeling. Even when you love Aunt Sally and you’ve heard her tell that story a dozen times before, if something doesn’t fit, keep that feeling in mind. Consider the details. Think about which ones could be verified and which ones will remain forever unverifiable because they weren’t the sorts of details that show up in written records. Does it fit what you know of broader history? Does it feel like something normal human beings would do, or how they would react?

Are those memories gypsies misidentified as pioneers?