The father of artists J. Leo and Avard Fairbanks, J. B. Fairbanks was born in Payson, Utah. Among Utah’s important early painters, he was one of several (including John Hafen, Lorus Pratt and Edwin Evans) sent by the Mormon church to Paris to study painting late in the last century. Fairbanks returned to participate in the painting of murals in the Salt Lake Temple and to struggle to make a living as an artist in Utah.

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