Item Detail
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3636
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5
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2
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English
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Letters from Paris
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Utah Historical Quarterly
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Spring 1986
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54
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179-202
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This article deals with several Utah artists who studied in Paris in the last part of the 19th century and then returned to make important contributions to the art of Utah and the Mormon church. Beginning with the studies of James T. Harwood and Cyrus E. Dallin in 1888, the author briefly discusses the experiences and motivations of these two, plus John Hafen, John B. Fairbanks, John Willard Clawson, Lorus Pratt, Edwin Evans, and Herman H. Haag. These artists, she says, 'provided a cultural enrichment to the territory possible unequalled before or since. The latter six of these eight artists were able to study in Paris in part because of a subsidy given by the Mormon church.' They painted several rooms in the Salt Lake Temple, they formed the Utah Art Institute, they contributed to art education in the public schools and in the colleges, and Harwood and Haag were the principle faculty members of the art department when it was founded at the University of Utah. 'What began initially as the desire of Dallin and Harwood to obtain advanced instruction and of the Mormon church to have professionally executed work done in the temples produced results that no one could have foreseen,' and altered for the better the development of Utah's artistic heritage.