Nephi Making the Plates for the Record

Lehi and his people sailed to the American continent. There, Nephi fulfilled a commandment to create records of his people by refining ore and producing metallic plates. He then inscribed his own account on the plates.

The inclusion of a blacksmith's tools and forge show Christensen's keen observation of his own environment. The large building in the background looks like a palace from the Italian Rennaisance, strangely out of place in the New World hundreds of years before Christ. No doubt Christensen was prompted by his familiarity with the European tradition of idealized landscapes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.