Mahonri Young was born in Salt Lake City in 1877.  He became interested in art as a young boy, and studied in Utah, New York and Paris to achieve national recognition as both a painter and a sculptor.  He died in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1957.

Young studied under J. T. Harwood, Edwin Evans, and John Hafen.  His classmates were other young local artists who later rose to prominence, including Lee Greene Richards, Jack Sears, and A. B. Wright. Beginning 1899, Young pursued his studies at the Art Students League in New York under George Bridgeman and Kenyon Cox. He began studies at the Académie Julian in Paris in late 1901.  Young trained in both painting and sculpture, but decided that his style was better suited to sculpture.

Young’s sculptural reputation was twofold—sculptures of laborers and prize fighters and his much larger depictions of frontier heroism.  Man With a Pick (1915), Stevedore (1904), Man Sawing (1912), and Right to the Jaw (1926–27) were influenced by the Group of Eight (Ashcan movement) in New York, an early-twentieth-group concerned with social realism.  His depictions of frontier heroism were influenced by his pioneer Utah roots.  In 1912, he sculpted the Sea Gull monument depicting a central theme in the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1947, during his last productive years, Young completed his landmark tribute to the Utah pioneers, the This is the Place monument.   His final sculpture, of his grandfather, Brigham Young, was commissioned to appear in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. 

Biographical information on this page was adapted from the Springville Museum of Art.