Mormon founder's 34 wives move artist

New York

IN Leslie O Peterson's mind, Fanny Alger's almond-shaped face, with its soulful green eyes and rosebud mouth, is framed by close-cropped brown hair and perched atop a long, slender neck. That's the way Peterson, a Utah artist, painted the 16-year-old Alger, who in the early 1830s is believed to have slipped away to a barn from her job as a serving girl to the Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith and his wife, Emma, and quietly become his first plural wife.

The details of the union remain a bit fuzzy, even among historians. But that this marriage and Smith's many others may have happened at all was a revelation to Peterson, 60, who until last fall believed Smith had married just one woman.