This story is part of Illinois Student Newsroom’s series: Champaign’s Honorary Streets: the Stories Behind the Signs.
CHAMPAIGN — The 400 block of Clark Street, between Prairie and Elm, is designated Honorary Harry Breen Way. Breen was a noted painter, an art professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a liturgical designer.
Breen’s daughter Melissa Breen said his love for the outdoors inspired his paintings, many of which focused on landscapes and Illinois prairies.
“I think he secretly wanted to be a farmer, and that’s what he said himself: ‘That’s where I get to see animals, I get to see the sky,’” Breen said. “That inspired the direction of where his art went early on.”
Breen said her father was famous for the way he painted the skies in his landscapes.
“People even say, ‘Oh, look, that’s a Harry Breen sky.’ He always had blue paint above his eyebrow or on his cheek,” she said.
Breen spent his childhood in Chicago during the Great Depression. When he was 13, he had to care for his younger siblings after his father contracted tuberculosis and his mother began working in the shipyards. He helped his family make money from selling his paintings, Melissa Breen said.
He enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 and soon after met his wife Diane. They stayed married for 60 years until she died in 2011.
“We got even closer, because he was pretty dependent on my mom, she was the ‘do it all,’ and so I became the ‘do it all’ for him,” Melissa Breen said. “He did his art, and then when he was older, the last two years of his life, he required a lot of extra care.”
Also a liturgical designer, Breen was known for the altars of the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, on Clark Street.
Michael Franklin-White, who was a colleague of Breen’s while he was an art professor at U of I, submitted Breen’s name for recognition through an honorary street designation in 2021, the year Breen died at age 90. He requested a portion of Clark Street because it was the same street as the Church of Holy Cross.
Kathy Wehrmann, a friend of Breen’s who also worked on his nomination, said she helped him decorate the altars at the Church of Holy Cross for Christmas and Easter.
“It was amazing. It was a labor of love to work under his direction. He created these beautiful altars for Christmas and then again at Easter time with all these beautiful, beautiful flowers,” she said.
Breen is most well-known for his paintings of the Illinois countryside. Melissa Breen said many people don’t realize how beautiful Illinois is, and that her dad’s work shows this.
“It conveys a view of Illinois that a lot of people don’t realize is there, and that Illinois actually is really beautiful,” she said. “It gives people a different view of: This is where we live and where we live is pretty nice.”
