Utah sculptor spends his own final years depicting the ‘culmination of Christ’s life’

One of America’s most iconic sculptors of Western themes, Edward J. Fraughton, died this summer at his Utah home after spending over six decades creating art that dots the country’s landscape — from the Mormon Battalion Monument in San Diego, California, to The Ancient Ones at the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park to The Cadet for Randolph-Macon Academy in Front Royal, Virginia.
Near the end of his life, Fraughton became passionate about one last artistic witness. For two years, he worked full time designing a depiction of what he believed to be “the most important day in all Christianity.”
Even after starting chemotherapy for a rare blood cancer, the artist continued pouring up to eight hours a day into this “last chapter.” But during that time, Fraughton was adamant that nobody photograph his masterpiece. Finally, death on June 2nd of 2024 “stayed the hand of the sculptor.”
Now, for the first time his family has allowed the Deseret News to photograph the completed model of his final masterpiece in hopes of one day fulfilling his dream of enlarging it to share with the world.
Edward Fraughton grew up in Park City with a father who worked for Union Pacific and a family who “just lived week to week.”
In his childhood home, religion “wasn’t a common topic of discussion,” but “somehow,” he writes, “I knew I believed in a God” – with a strong sense throughout his life “that there was some mighty powerful force acting in my behalf.”
This didn’t spare heartache in his young life, however. One winter, Edward and his siblings were sledding down the steep, snowy Park City hills when his 4-year-old brother Billy hit a metal rod sticking out of the ground head-on and eventually died.
Little Edward cried “every day” for many months. Then, one day, he “just decided, ‘I’m not going to cry for you anymore, Billy. I’m just going to live my life for both of us.’”
For the rest of his life, Fraughton felt that “just being alive was a miracle.”
He was “immensely curious” — once writing, “I found it amazing that only I could look out and see the world through this particular set of windows called eyes.”
“If I learned to listen carefully enough,” he also expressed his belief that “answers to important questions would come to me.”
After Fraughton’s simple drawing of a coal depot in Park City caught her eye, his elementary school teacher, Aline Gibbons, gave him crayons and said, “I’m going to keep you in from recess. I want you to redraw it.” A month later, young Edward was shocked to learn in a school assembly that he’d been awarded first place for fourth graders nationally by the Milton Bradley Company, after his teacher submitted the drawing for an “America the Beautiful” art contest.
Fast-forward to the University of Utah, where Fraughton initially studied to be an engineer, before considering life as a musician. But ultimately, his son Ted Fraughton recounted how he decided “sculpture would make more of a contribution to humanity, so that’s what he picked to do with this life” — eventually studying under Dr. Avard T. Fairbanks.
The more significant partnership, however, emerged at junior prom, where Fraughton was mixing plaster for decorations when he came face to face with student Ann Stevenson.
“Will you help me?” he asked, looking up at Ann.
“I looked in his eyes,” she recalls, “and it was like, ‘For the rest of your life, I’ll help you.’”
“It was like a soul thing,” she says, smiling. They were married a year later — with Ann by his side through the coming decades as what Ted Fraughton calls “the ultimate unshakeable sanctuary” for the development of both the family’s four beloved children and their unfolding artistic dreams.
The Fraughton family soon found themselves living the quintessential life of a poor artist. After growing up in a family of means, Ann Fraughton learned “what it was like to be poor” — discovering what it was like to “cook on a coal stove and not have a hot water heater.”
She remembers the day they could “afford to buy a small can of frozen orange juice, and we made it up, and we all got to have a taste of orange juice.”
Fraughton finally secured work at Job Corps, putting together an arts and crafts program where he was encouraged to finish his master’s degree. Yet when he applied to complete his studies at the University of Utah, Ann Fraughton recalls his shock of receiving a letter saying “your art doesn’t fit the standards that the University of Utah has set for its arts program.”
Fraughton’s art was apparently too classic, in the style of ancient Roman and Greek statues, and not abstract enough for modern sensibilities. That discouraged him from finishing the degree, and continuing the job, too. Although it was an “amazing thing” to have a regular paycheck, Ann Fraughton recollects Edward asking her feelings about the possibility of quitting the job to do art full time.
“Let me think about it,” she recollected saying. “And it just felt right. It felt right.”
“You can’t make a living doing art,” others still cautioned him. Yet Fraughton would respond, “I’m only 24 years old. I don’t know any better. I’m going to try it anyway.”
“And he did it,” Ted Fraughton says, recounting an entire professional career spent sculpting, with a family that “always somehow scraped by and made ends meet.”
A couple years after the university rejection, Fraughton won the gold medal in sculpture at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame’s first art show. Over the course of his career, 190 sculptures were created for galleries, private collections and historic sites that won many other awards.
“He would have been a painter if there just had been enough time, but there wasn’t,” Ann Fraughton reflects. In one form or another, “he was always creating. … If he couldn’t be doing his sculpture, he was doing music.” Fraughton still took piano lessons into his 60s.
In the ’70s, the family bought an old Latter-day Saint church house in rural South Jordan, built in 1926 and dedicated by Heber J. Grant — becoming their new home for fifty years and a place the family now dreams can become a destination gallery one day, a few blocks from the South Jordan Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Walking in the main studio in West Jordan to see all the sculptures is quite a sight. “There’s a lot to see here,” Ted Fraughton says. “Yeah, his whole life’s here.”
Referencing Genesis where God created Earth from matter and “gave it form,” the sculptor’s son reflects, “He took a lump of clay, and turned it into what you see.”
“I never intended to work for my dad for my entire life,” Ted Fraughton adds. “Most of us grow up and say, ‘Bye, Mom and Dad,’ and we go out on our own.”
But one day, his father was working on the Spirit of Wyoming (now on the state’s Capitol grounds), and asked once more, “Can you help me?” His son was between jobs and agreed to what he thought would be a three-month project.
For the next 42 years, he was by his father’s side and “spent more time together than I spent with anybody.”
Making a bigger sculpture depends on a foam form, around which details are sculpted in clay on the outside. Once his father finished all the clay detail, it was Ted Fraughton’s job to “get it in the metal” — using a process of metal casting where liquid bronze (at 2,200 degrees) is poured into a mold. ”if you have a drip of bronze on your foot,” he says with the smile of someone experienced enough to be able to joke about molten metal, “it’ll just run off like a raindrop would, but you just don’t want to get it down inside your shoes.”
This method is remarkably and largely unchanged since the third century B.C. “Our materials got better with technology, but the basic way of doing it has stayed primarily the same.”
To hone his craft, Fraughton would join university medical students in studying cadavers. As a result, his son says, “My dad knew anatomy like a surgeon did.”
“Most artists cover all that up with drapery,” but in his father’s work, Ted Fraughton says, “you can tell it’s a rib cage,” etc. As a result, the sculptor never used models unless he was doing a portrait — instead, following his heart.
Fraughton’s largest sculpture was a 36 piece contribution of covered wagons, people and animals for one of the largest monuments in America, five city blocks entitled The Spirit of Nebraska’s Wilderness and Pioneer Courage Park, commissioned by First National Bank of Omaha, Nebraska. The entire project took 10 years to complete, in collaboration with two other artists (who added to the wagon train and wildlife).
After shipping the Omaha sculpture, a stack of papers arrived asking all the models to sign a waiver, Ted Fraughton remembers. When Fraughton reported there would be no need, the bank “couldn’t grasp the idea that he didn’t use models.”
Fraughton looked more to the masters of the past as his standard — Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci — than to modern opinion. This “neoclassicist born in the west” made sure to travel throughout Europe to see and study the great works.
Painter Joseph Brickey describes Fraughton as the heir of a more ancient artistic tradition that’s been left behind over the last century — “orphaned” by a popular norm whose standards have become “less about glorifying ideas and monumental things, and became more about self-expression.”
After spending time studying Rembrandt and other masters, Fraughton said, “I know why they’re so great” — pointing out how Rembrandt took the time to discover more about light in a way that allowed him to depict it different than anyone else.
When it comes to three-dimensional sculpting, which needed to “look just as good from the back as it did the front for him,” Fraughton similarly invested years trying to “understand motion and how the body works,” his son says, “whether it’s a horse or a cow or a human.”
Compared with a “totally stagnant” image that is “frozen in time,” Ted Fraughton describes his father’s work as having “motion in it.” For instance, with The Duke, a John Wayne tribute housed in The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, he says, “Look at his hips. Look at his shoulders. Look how much motion” there is.
Across the ages, good artists have tried to capture “glimpses of a majestic history of (their) people,” Ted Fraughton says. His father was an “insatiable” student of facts and loved American history, which has far less artistic treatment compared with European art.
Fraughton sculpted four American presidents — Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt — and would meet six presidents over his career.
After creating Reagan’s inaugural medal, Reagan fell in love with Fraughton’s piece, Where Trails End — depicting an old cowboy whose horse has given out in the snow, with the rider trying to figure out what to do next.
“If I ever had any money, this is the bronze that I would want to have,” the president said — with a copy of the statue made available for his private office in the White House between 1981-1989 and a bronze now on permanent display at the Ronald Reagan library in California.
Fraughton made sure to feature the cultural diversity of Western history — from Irish and Chinese workers on the railroad, to celebrated Anasazi and Frederick Douglass statues.
Many of his pieces have a “Michelangelo-esque kind of energy,” Joseph Brickey tells the Deseret News. The painter calls elements of Fraughton’s approach “incomparable” — such as how he combined “classical ideals with the monumentality of the American spirit,” ultimately producing what he considers “some of the greatest examples of American sculpture in our history.”
A year before he died, Fraughton was awarded a fellowship from the National Sculpture Society to work and lecture as the sculptor in residence at the Daniel Chester French studio in Massachusetts.
That’s where he began a sculpture of Frederick Douglass teaching a young slave to read (the renowned Civil War era leader who famously said, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free”).
French, the renowned artist behind the Lincoln monument, also sculpted The Angel of Death and the Young Sculptor in 1892, with a poem at the base reading: “‘Come, stay your hand,’ Death to the Sculptor cried. / Those who are sleeping have not really died.”
A year later, Fraughton would have his own hand stayed, surrounded by children and 12 grandchildren who he adored — with the family leaving many of his sculpting tools throughout his studio right where he left them.
Fraughton always felt like he wanted to do a Christ sculpture, but with all this other “outside, noisy stuff that paid the bills,” Ted Fraughton says his father was unable to do more than some smaller projects. “He wanted to do it right.”
“Before he left this earth, he wanted to make this his final statement” and “last chapter” — focused on the “culmination of Christ’s life here on Earth.”
Across two years, Fraughton worked on this final piece — up until the springtime when the cancer got worse.
“It’s his testimony. It’s what he believes.”
The image shows Christ coming out of the tomb, and Mary Magdalene not recognizing him, asking, “Where’s my Lord?” When he finally says to her, “Mary,” she realizes it’s Jesus. “She, of course, wants to go hug him, but he says, touch me not,” Ted Fraughton narrates.
Pools designed for each end are representative of the importance of baptism and conversion to Christ. There’s also symbolism in the bas relief (sculptures on a flat wall hanging), including stars, a lamb and a cross. A dove on an angel’s hand symbolizes the Holy Ghost.
The small model of the piece is completed with all the details, but they weren’t able to convert it to the large version before his death, which Fraughton hoped would eventually become 8- or 9-foot-tall figures. “We’ve got everything we need to enlarge it,” Ted Fraughton says, including an artist hand-picked for the job.
Retaining copies of all of his body of work, the family hopes one day to fulfill the sculptor’s “big dream” of featuring this resurrection masterpiece where anyone can come see it alongside other celebrated pieces of art.
Noting that there are 25,000 people a day going into the Sistine Chapel, Ted Fraughton says, “That’s what great art can do. It can attract people in the masses, and it speaks to us on a whole different level than anything else.”
While visiting a Carl Rungius gallery in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Fraughton called his wife to come over. “Look, have you seen this one?”
Upon seeing a landscape print, Ann Fraughton sat down and started crying. “I could not take in any more beauty than what was right in front of me. And I thought I didn’t know anybody could do it better than God.”
Yet this is “the first thing we’re getting rid of in schools,” Ted Fraughton adds. “Our children grow up and they don’t know how to deal with life because they’re not creative. They can’t navigate themselves around the hurdles anymore.”
“So art really teaches us more than we think” and “transports us to a different place than we’re standing in.”