Born in France, Albert Fleury was a successful painter of murals and easel landscape paintings. Fleury came to Chicago in 1888 with a commission to paint murals in the new Auditorium Building, and he was subsequently one of the first artists to make the city a primary artistic subject.
The Auditorium Building is a mammoth structure in downtown Chicago designed by the partnership of Dankmar Adler and Louis H. Sullivan. Completed in 1889, it incorporated a hotel, offices, a large theater, and a banquet hall, and was innovative in both its engineering and its style. The theater features mural paintings by Albert Fleury and Charles Holloway. Fleury painted the series of smaller murals in the banquet hall, which was converted to a recital hall, now called Ganz Hall, in 1956, when it was taken over by the Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University. These murals were conserved by the Art Institute of Chicago during the restoration of Ganz Hall in the early 2000s.