THE LISTING WENT LIVE on September 11, 2025: a two-bed, two-bath, two-story residence in Chicago’s well-heeled Lincoln Park neighborhood, priced to move at $1.175 million. If dates are omens, this one seemed eager to signify. In fact, the listing did send tremors through some corners of Chicago—not exactly a blow to American empire, but certainly an insult to anyone who cares about such trifles as local history.
The architecture is modest: a common, Chicago-brick, Italianate job with a storefront on the ground floor and living quarters above. It was constructed in 1888 by a minor German émigré architect and over the years had hosted a tobacco shop, a grocery, a bookbindery, and an ice cream parlor. Almost every Chicago neighborhood boasts buildings with similar résumés. The reason this one mattered was simple: It was once the home and studio of Roger Brown, arguably Chicago’s greatest twentieth-century painter.
Brown purchased the property in 1974. He was then thirty-two years old and one of the rising stars of what critics dubbed Imagi…