C.C.A. Christensen "Folk" Artist

Christensen, Carl C. Anthon(1831-1912)
Carl Christian Anton Christensen was born in Denmark in 1832. He studied painting and toy making at the Academy of Art in Copenhagen. In 1850, he became a member of the Latter-day Saint (LDS) Church and served an LDS mission to Vest-Sjelland, Denmark. After returning home, he joined an emigrant company that took him to England and eventually to New York. From New York, he and his wife, Elsie Scheel, traveled to Nauvoo, Illinois, where they purchased a handcart and traveled by foot to Utah. He arrived in Utah with the "Danish flag flying from his cart, his trousers flapping in tatters about his legs."
During his trek, Christensen made many sketches of the American scenery and the events that happened along the journey, but it was not until the 1860s that he had the opportunity to paint again. Little about C. C. A. Christensen's first years in Utah is known. Many years passed between his arrival in 1857 and any public exhibition of his paintings.
LDS pioneer and religious themes dominate Christensen's work. Perhaps his greatest achievement is Mormon Panorama, a monumental narrative that tells in twenty-two 8' x 12' scenes about the history of the LDS Church from Joseph Smith's vision in Palmyra, New York, to the arrival of the LDS pioneers in the Great Salt Lake Valley. To make transportation of the panorama easier, the scenes were attached in sequence as a continuous scroll on a roller, and the artist and panorama toured in Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah (1869-1890).
The pioneer experience was a favorite theme of Christensen's in smaller works as well. Typical are two paintings from the 1890s: Handcart Pioneer's First View of Salt Lake Valley (1890, SMA) and Winter Quarters (1891, SMA).
"C. C. A.," as he was called by historians in his later life and after his death, was one of the first artists employed to paint scenery for the Salt Lake Theater. He also worked on decoration for the St. George, Manti, and Logan LDS temples.
Christensen's work has a naive, or primitive, quality that stems from his simple treatment of anatomy and perspective, which he learned during his early artistic training in Denmark. A genre artist by nature, his paintings, or scenes from daily life, reflect great narrative skill that earns him respect as a visual historian of his people.