Portrait of Oliver Cowdery, the First Mormon Lawyer, Joins BYU Law School

In addition to being the "second elder" of the Church during the Restoration, one of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon and the principal scribe for its translation, Oliver Cowdery was the first Mormon lawyer in Church history. Now, a portrait hanging in the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University memorializes him for that achievement and the sterling character he exemplified during his legal career.

Unveiled during a luncheon program Nov. 5 at the law school, the portrait was painted by Ken Corbett in 2006, commissioned that year by the Mormon Historic Sites Foundation from a daguerreotype photograph discovered in the Library of Congress holdings by LDS researcher Patrick Bishop. It was a serendipitous discovery for Brother Bishop, who was working on something else at the time.

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