The Warrenville Church Where Ivan Albright Painted Dorian Gray
Here is a thing about Warrenville that never quite lands until you say it out loud: one of the most famous American paintings of the twentieth century was made in a little building on Second Street. Not a museum in the city. Not a studio in New York. Right here, in an old church a few blocks from where you buy your groceries.
The painting is The Picture of Dorian Gray. The painter was Ivan Albright. And the reason this town had a working art studio at all comes down to a family that showed up in 1924 and decided Warrenville was pretty enough to stay.
How the Albrights got here
Adam Emory Albright was already a respected oil painter when he moved his wife and three sons to Warrenville in 1924. His thing was sunlight and childhood: big canvases of kids barefoot in fields, that sort of warmth. He used his own boys as models early on, and later he painted plenty of Warrenville kids too. If your family has been in town a long while, there is a real chance one of your relatives is in a painting hanging somewhere right now.
Two of those sons were twins, Ivan and Malvin, and both became artists. Malvin painted and sculpted under the name Zsissly, partly so he would not spend his whole career sorted alphabetically next to his brother. Ivan went a completely different direction from his father. Where Adam painted sunshine, Ivan painted mortality: skin, rust, rot, time doing what time does. The style got called magic realism. It is not always comfortable to look at, and that was the point.
The church that became a studio
The family took over the old Warrenville Methodist Church and turned it into a studio and gallery. All three of them worked out of it, and it ran as the Albright Studio from 1924 to about 1957. Ivan kept a studio in Warrenville for roughly twenty years, and by most accounts those were his most productive years. He was slow. Famously, almost absurdly slow, working a canvas for years at a time. That kind of patience needs a quiet town, and he had one.
Then Hollywood called. For the 1945 film of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the director needed a portrait of a beautiful man's soul going bad, and Ivan Albright was the obvious choice. The movie was shot in black and white. The painting was filmed in color, on purpose, so it would hit the audience like a slap. It worked. That painting made him nationally famous, and he later gave it, along with much of his work, to the Art Institute of Chicago, where you can still stand in front of it today. You can see it at the Art Institute, then drive twenty five miles west and stand where it was painted. Not many towns can offer that.
Your neighbors are in these paintings
This is the part that makes it a Warrenville story instead of an art history footnote. Ivan did not import models. He used the people around him.
- George Washington Stafford, of the family that ran the Warren Tavern, sat for And God Created Man in His Own Image.
- Hugo Kleinwachter, a German immigrant and the town blacksmith, modeled for Among Those Left.
- Art and Arline Stanford, neighbors, appear in The Lineman and Flesh.
- The barn behind the family home shows up in Among Those Left and Fleeting Time, Thou Hast Left Me Old.
Warrenville liked him back. When Ivan returned for a visit in 1978, the City declared it Ivan Albright Day and threw him a full day of celebrating. By every account he was warm and funny and charmed the whole town, which is a nice surprise for a man who spent his life painting decay. In 1997, on what would have been his hundredth birthday, the Art Institute mounted a major show of his work.
Go see it, it is right there
The old studio is now the Warrenville Historical Museum & Art Gallery at 3S530 Second Street. The Warrenville Historical Society organized in 1980 and opened the museum in one room of the building in 1984. It now fills the whole place. The collection holds originals and reproductions from all three Albright artists, which means you can look at their work while standing in the room where they made it. That is a genuinely rare thing and it is free to walk into.
Summer hours are Wednesdays from 1 to 3 PM and Sundays from noon to 3 PM. Those are short windows, so check before you drive over. You can also call (630) 393-4215 or email info@warrenvillehistorical.org to set up a tour or dig through the research files.
If you want to make an afternoon of it, the Historical Society runs a free mobile walking tour at warrenville.toursphere.com, and Discover DuPage has mapped out the Albright locations around town: the studio, the smaller studios the twins used, the tavern, the home site, the blacksmith shop. It is a short loop and it rearranges how you see streets you have driven down a thousand times. There is also a photograph of Ivan standing with his Dorian Gray hanging in the Warrenville Gallery over at City Hall.
Why it still matters
Warrenville has been an art town for a hundred years and mostly does not brag about it. That thread is still running. Art on the Prairie comes around on September 12, and the Historical Society keeps the doors open on volunteer hours and small donations. The Albrights did not come here because Warrenville was famous. They came because it was quiet and green and full of faces worth painting. That is still true. Go take a look.
Hours and details change. Confirm with the Warrenville Historical Society before you head over.