Gutzon Borglum was born in log cabin near Bear Lake, Idaho in 1867 and lived in Utah until 1869.   The first sculptor to celebrate the American west and most well known as the sculptor of the Mount Rushmore monument, he created more than 170 sculptures in his lifetime. He died while on speaking tour in Chicago in 1941.

Borglum’s parents were Danish immigrants who converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  He spent his childhood in Omaha and when he was seventeen, he moved with his family to Los Angeles where he worked as a lithographer.  Borglum studied with Virgil Williams at the Mark Hopkins School of Art in San Francisco in the 1880s. From 1890 to 1893 he lived in Paris where he studied the academic approach to sculpting at the Académie Julian and at the École des Beaux Arts.  Auguste Rodin was a major influence on his work.  By 1896, Borglum exhibited both painting and sculpture in London and Paris.

Borglum moved to New York in 1901.  His first sculptural success was the Mares of Diomedes (1903). He was commissioned to create a sculpture of the apostles that became part of the statuary at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  Sculptures of Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Paine were also commissioned. His large sculpture, The Head of Lincoln, appears in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

While working on The Head of Lincoln, Borglum became interested in increasingly monumental sculptural size.  He worked on his most famous sculpture, The Mount Rushmore National Monument, in the Black Hills of South Dakota from 1927 until his death in 1941. The 60-foot faces of Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt were blasted out of the granite of the 5,275-foot peak.  His son, Lincoln Borglum, finished the monument after his father’s death.

Biographical information on this page was adapted from the Springville Museum of Art.