Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Mahonri Young is best known as a sculptor and painter of religious subjects and in New York City for sculpture and paintings of of boxers and laboring people. In America he was one of the early sculptors of genre figures, that is everyday people going about their everyday lives.

He introduced these social realist subjects in 1904, and this focus on non-lofty subjects has been perceived as a threat to the Beaux Arts style that had been prevalent because of the European academic training of the dominant sculptors such as Augustus Saint Gaudens. However, this new realism of Young's, inspired by his exposure to the French peasants in the paintings of Jean-Francois Millet, did not have wide-spread...