An accomplished landscape, portrait, figure and mural artist, Alma Wright was respected both as an artist and a dignified, attractive man with high personal standards, the result of Mormon upbringing and art studies in Europe. He devoted most of his career to teaching art in Utah.

He was born and raised in Salt Lake City in a neighborhood with Mahonri Young and Lee Greene Richards, future well-known artists influenced by George Ottinger, from whom they took lessons at his neighborhood studio in the 1880s and 1890s. They later referred to themselves as the "20th Ward Group."

Wright studied at Ladder Day Saints College from 1892 to 1895 and then at the University of Utah from 1895 to 1896, the student of Herman H...