Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (February 20, 1897 – November 18, 1983) was an American painter, sculptor and print-maker most renowned for his self-portraits, character studies, and still lifes.

[3] He shocked, awed and upset the viewing public through his emphasis on the fragility of the body, flesh and the human condition with such works as The Lineman (1928), That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door) (1931), and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1943).

[6] Likewise, Ivan's father Adam Emory Albright was an Impressionist painter and student of Thomas Eakins who built his reputation on landscapes and idealized paintings of children.

Through their father, the boys were introduced to several prominent American Impressionists and Realists including Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, William Glackens, Maurice Prendergast, Edmund Tarbell and John Twachtman.

His family moved frequently due to his father's career and it wasn't until 1910 that they settled in Hubbard Woods where Ivan and Malvin could attend New Trier High School.

[12] While stationed in Nantes, France between 1918 and 1919, Albright produced at least eight sketchbooks of medical drawings illustrating surgeries and wounds in graphite and watercolor.

While Albright was not yet an accomplished draftsman, art historians and critics often cite these illustrations as the catalyst of his interest in the fragility of the flesh and humanity for those suffering.

Bellows was at the time, however, on sabbatical in Europe and so Ivan instead chose to move to the National Academy of Design to study under Charles Webster Hawthorne.

[19] Between 1925 and 1926, Albright's mature "baroque" formal style began to emerge,[19] and in many cases the general public was not prepared for his "naked and uncompromising disclosure of the human condition.

[23] It was during the years at this studio that Ivan's style began to cause controversy: In May 1928 his painting The Lineman was used as the cover for the trade magazine Electric Light and Power.

[24][23] Not long after, Albright began working on paintings that emphasized the microscopic quality of surface as much as baroque form, beginning with Woman (1928).

In July of that year he exhibited fourteen paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago alongside fellow artists George and Martin Baer.

[26] That year as well, following the completion of the monumental Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida (1929–30), he began his decade-long obsession with his magnum-opus That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door) (1931).

[31][32] The subject nonetheless allowed Albright to display in the woman weariness and deterioration and thus to critique the positivist outlook of Regionalist artists like Grant Wood and Doris Lee.

[34] Work on The Window experienced its first interruption when Ivan and Malvin were asked to paint for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, directed by Albert Lewin.

[39] Upon completing The Window in 1962, he immediately began work on a posthumous portrait of his father-in-law Captain Joseph Medill Patterson (1962–64), an officer during WWI and the founder of the New York Daily News.

[40] This was in part because, through Josephine and her sister Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, the artist acquired partial ownership of a ranch in Dubois, Wyoming.

[41] The ranch was a fitting setting for a series of Western-themed artworks including Roaring Fork, Wyoming (1948), The Purist (1949), The Wild Bunch (Hole in the Wall Gang) (1951), Tin (1952–54) and The Rustlers (1959, 1963–64).

[42][43] Likewise, upon Alicia's passing in 1963, Ivan and Josephine inherited her plantation in Georgia, just north of Jacksonville, prompting Albright to take particular interest in the swamp as a subject.

[44][45] Ivan's time in Georgia between 1963 and 1965 was in part, however, out of necessity as the city of Chicago decided to tear down his studio on Ogden Avenue to make way for a shopping mall.

In part to escape this "scene", Ivan and Josephine moved to Woodstock, Vermont in 1963, but were only able to begin living there full-time in 1965 when the property was fully renovated.

[55] Ida is akin to many of Albright's other works due to the dead and decaying look of the figure as well as the deeper (and often dark) meanings that are hidden within.

One of his most famous paintings, titled That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door), took him ten years to complete and won top prize at three major exhibitions in New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia in 1941.

[56] In 1943, Albright was commissioned to create the titular painting for Albert Lewin's film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.