Salt Lake City
April 20 – June 16

A New Exhibition Celebrates the Dean of Utah Artists

More than 60 works from private and public collections, including Zions Bank and the Utah Governor’s Mansion, by the artist James Taylor Harwood (Utah, 1860-1940) will be on view in a new exhibit at Anthony’s Fine Art in Salt Lake City.

Harwood was an international star who had an outsized influence on Utah’s artists and arts institutions. Born to Mormon pioneers in Lehi, Utah, his paintings of early Utah landmarks, of France, Italy, and California now hang in public institutions; but, some of the his most important works are only found in private homes, unseen for nearly 100 years. Harwood was the first Utah artist accepted to the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, then the world’s most prestigious art school, where he worked alongside Henry Ossawa Tanner and associated with superstars William Bouguereau and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Harwood then exhibited at the highly competitive Paris Salon des Artistes Français — where less then one percent of submissions were accepted — over multiple years, often sending works painted from his home near Liberty Park.

With no museums and no fine art galleries, turn-of-the-century Salt Lake had little to offer professional artists. So, even as he continued making masterpieces that went abroad or to the odd local collection, Harwood turned to teaching in order to support his young family. He began with a private studio in Salt Lake, then became the art instructor at Salt Lake High (i.e. now “West High School”), and, finally, in 1922 was appointed President of the Art Institute at the University of Utah, where he earned the informal title “Dean of Utah Artists.” His students dominated the region through paintings and as the leaders of institutions. His students include Alice Merrill Horne (Founding Director of the Utah Division of Arts & Museums), Florence Ware (University Professor and President of the Association of Utah Artists), the “Mormon Art Missionaries” ( John Hafen, JB Fairbanks, Herman Haag, Edwin Evans, and Lorus Pratt, who founded the Springville Museum of Art and painted the interior of the Salt Lake Temple), Mahonri Young (Internationally renown sculptor and painter; maker of the This Is the Place Monument.), to name only a few of Harwood’s artistic progeny.

Harwood’s own accomplishments are monumental. With the painting “Salt Crested Rocks at Black Rock” (1898), he captured the unspoiled shores of the Great Salt Lake and won the first Statewide art contest. Harwood traveled to Europe frequently, and had celebrated shows in Paris, New York, and Chicago; but, his most often painted subjects were of City Creek Canyon, Liberty Park, and Millcreek Canyon. The exhibition has many of these paintings and drawings, made in different seasons of the year and of Harwood’s life, hanging alongside one another for the first time in decades.

Visiting the Exhibition Collecting
James Taylor Harwood: From Unseen Private Collections
April 20 – June 16
401 East 200 South Salt Lake City, UT 84111
Monday – Saturday, 10AM – 5PM
Free Admission anthonysfineart.com
Anthony’s Fine Art will be open for Gallery Stroll: Friday, April 21, 6-9PM Friday, May 26, 6-9PM

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