No confirmed photograph of Joseph Smith exists, but an unnamed donor has given a locket containing a daguerreotype purported to contain an image of him to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“As we have acknowledged since the discovery of the locket in 2020, we cannot draw a conclusion about who is pictured in the daguerreotype,” the church stated in a news release about the donation.
The church released the statement in response to media questions.
Joseph Smith was born in 1805 and murdered in 1844.
Louis Daguerre announced his invention of the first publicly available photographic process in 1839.
The discovery of the locket and the image were announced in a 2022 issue of the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal (www.jwha.info).
The discovery was made by Daniel Larsen, Joseph Smith’s great-great grandson and a Latter-day Saint, who inherited family heirlooms from his mother, Lois Smith Larsen, prior to her death in 1992.
The collection included two pocket watches, one with Joseph Smith III’s initials engraved on the front. The second watch featured an image of several buildings along the shore of a lake. Larsen was unable to open the second piece because he said the release mechanism was bent. He set the watch aside and forgot about it.
Larsen picked up the object again in 2020 and managed to open it. Inside he found the image that he came to believe was his great-great-grandfather.
Larsen believes the watch was actually a watch locket, a piece of daguerrean jewelry that looks like a pocket watch when closed.
Research by Lachlan Mackay, a member of the Community of Christ’s Council of Twelve Apostles, and Ronald Romig found that a Latter-day Saint daguerreotypist named Lucian Foster moved from New York City to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1844 and lived in the Smith mansion house for two months before Joseph Smith’s death.
It is known that Foster made daguerreotypes in the area after that, and Joseph Smith III repeatedly stated that Foster made a daguerreotype of his father, Mackay reported.
The church’s statement invited people to learn more at the Church History Catalog. A search for “Joseph Smith daguerreotype” returns three results. A search for “Smith, Joseph, 1805-1844 -- Portraits” returns a few more.
The results generally point readers to articles about speculation that a daguerreotype might exist.
The catalog includes a 1918 letter to the First Presidency about the rumors of a possible Joseph Smith daguerreotype.
“It would seem possible therefore,” the letter writer stated, “that a daguerreotype picture of the Prophet Joseph Smith may have been made, there being an interval of five years between the introduction of the daguerreotype and the death of the Prophet.”
The letter writer included a fact sheet about the history of daguerreotypes, which were superseded by other processes in the 1850s.
“In the year 1839 Daguerre made known his beautiful method of obtaining photographic pictures upon metallic plates,” the letter stated, quoting “Miller’s Chemistry.”
The church regularly obtains historic items by donation.
“This donation,” the church’s news release stated, “adds to an extensive collection of artifacts from that time period that invite people to study and prayerfully ponder the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the extraordinary life and ministry of the Prophet Joseph Smith."
