Arnold Friberg

Arnold Friberg was born on December 21, 1913, in Winnetka, Illinois, and moved with his family to Arizona in 1916. His parents enrolled him in a correspondence cartooning course as a boy, and early encouragement came from a working cartoonist at The Arizona Republican. He studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, sometimes cited as graduating in 1935 though this is not confirmed by primary academic records, then worked in commercial art in Chicago before moving to New York in 1940 to take night classes at the Grand Central School of Art under Harvey Dunn, alongside fellow student Norman Rockwell.

From around age seventeen, Friberg painted calendar art of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a body of work that grew to more than two hundred paintings over his career and is widely described as making him the only American ever named an honorary member of the RCMP. In the 1950s, Adele Cannon Howells, then Primary President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commissioned him to paint twelve scenes from the Book of Mormon; the series was widely reproduced in the church's Friend magazine and in printed editions of the Book of Mormon. In the mid-1950s, Cecil B. DeMille hired him for the production of The Ten Commandments, where he worked in the art department and on costume design and produced fifteen "pre-visualization" paintings that shaped the film's look and were used in worldwide promotion; the work brought him an Academy Award nomination, though the exact nomination category is not consistently documented in sources.

Friberg later settled in Utah. In 1975 he completed The Prayer at Valley Forge, which became one of the best-known American patriotic paintings and was strongly associated with the 1976 Bicentennial. Around 1958 he was appointed a lifetime member of the Royal Society of Arts by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and in 1978 he was commissioned to paint near-life-size equestrian portraits of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles. He died on July 1, 2010, in a Salt Lake City care center while recovering from hip replacement surgery, at age 96, and is buried at Salt Lake City Cemetery.

Friberg's reputation rests less on gallery or academic criticism than on sustained public and official recognition of a small number of iconic images. Gallery materials describe President Ronald Reagan as having praised The Prayer at Valley Forge in a Thanksgiving proclamation, though the exact wording, date, and primary source could not be independently confirmed for this profile. The 2006 U.S. Congressional Record described the same painting as "one of the great American patriotic paintings," placing it alongside Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware. His work for The Ten Commandments drew praise from Cecil B. DeMille himself, who is quoted in gallery biographies calling Friberg's religious art notable for its "virility and warmth, dramatic understanding and truth." The consistent thread across these responses is that Friberg's images function as national and religious touchstones first, with formal art criticism a secondary concern.

Friberg's secondary market has been modest but is strengthening. His current auction record is USD 126,000, set by In the Waters of Manitou at Christie's New York on January 23, 2025, a rise of approximately 35 percent over his previous record of USD 93,600 for Uncertain Odds at the Jackson Hole Art Auction on September 15, 2017. His estate collection is handled in part by First Freedom Art Company, which lends works, including The Prayer at Valley Forge, to museum exhibitions, and by Art Country Canada / Rocky Mountain Art Gallery, which states that it represents his entire collection; no single gallery is documented as his sole or official representative. No catalogue raisonne has been published.

Friberg has no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification through his estate representatives, First Freedom Art Company and Art Country Canada, matter more than they would for an artist with a settled scholarly record; note that both organizations describe themselves as holding or representing his collection, so buyers should confirm chain of title on any individual work. His auction market is thin, with a record set only in January 2025 and most prior results well under six figures, so headline prices should be read as data points rather than a stable trend line. Institutional visibility is a genuine strength: The Prayer at Valley Forge is on public display at the Museum of the Bible, Springville Museum of Art holds studio material, and the Booth Western Art Museum has organized a dedicated loan exhibition for 2026 and 2027, all of which support long-term demand for an artist whose best-known images remain deeply embedded in American civic and religious life.