Quick Facts
Biography
Robert Winthrop Chanler (February 22, 1872 – October 24, 1930) was an American artist and member of the Astor and Dudley–Winthrop families. A designer and muralist, Chanler received much of his art training in France at the École des Beaux-Arts, and there his most famous work, titled "Giraffes", was completed in 1905 and later purchased by the French Government. Robert D. Coe, who studied with him, described Chanler as being "eccentric and almost bizarre."
Early life
Chanler was born on February 22, 1872 in New York City to John Winthrop Chanler (1826–1877) of the Dudley–Winthrop family and Margaret Astor Ward (1838–1875) of the Astor family. Through his father, he was a great-great-grandson of Peter Stuyvesant and a great-great-great-great-grandson of Wait Winthrop and Joseph Dudley. Through his mother, he was a grandnephew of Julia Ward (1819–1910), John Jacob Astor III (1822–1890), and William Backhouse Astor, Jr. (1829–1892). Robert had nine brothers and sisters, including politicians Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler and William Astor Chanler. His sister Margaret Livingston Chanler served as a nurse with the American Red Cross during the Spanish–American War. Robert's eldest brother John Armstrong "Archie" Chanler married novelist Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy. He and his siblings became orphans after the death of their mother in 1875 and their father in 1877, both to pneumonia. The children were raised at their parents' estate in Rokeby in Barrytown, New York.
Career
Like Mai Rogers Coe and Everett Shinn, Chanler was staying in Paris in the 1890s and became involved with the art community. When he returned to the U.S. in the early 1900s, he purchased a townhouse on East 19th Street, decorated it with his own works, and called it his House of Fantasy. The townhouse became a social center for New York's art community. Like Everett Shinn, Chanler was a personality and a figure in his time.
Chanler was a member of the New York State Assembly (Dutchess Co., 2nd D.) in 1904.
Chanler specialized in painted screens and was a member of the National Society of Mural Painters. A ceiling mural of buffaloes painted by Chanler is in the Coe House in Brookville, New York. He was also a member of the Architectural League of New York. He painted a ceiling inside the Colony Club, a private member's club located at Park Avenue and 62nd Street in New York City.
In 1905 Chanler exhibited a work entitled Au Pays des Girafes (or et argent) at the Salon d'Automne in Paris (no. 328 of the catalogue). This was the exhibition that prompted the critic Louis Vauxcelles to label a group of painters "fauves" (wild beasts), thus marking the birth of Fauvism.
The Armory Show
Chanler's work was featured in the 1913 Armory Show in New York, and he was one of the most acclaimed American artist in the exhibition. The elaborately painted screens he submitted were placed near the entrance of the show (Gallery A) where they captured the attention of the public and critics. Chanler's screen titled Hopi Indian Snake Dance was reproduced in the New York Herald, 15 February 1913. A work titled Porcupines was reproduced on postcard made for the Armory Show. Another screen by Chanler depicting porcupines is currently in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. According to the catalogues for the Armory Show, Chanler was represented by nine screens at the New York venue and eight screens at the Art Institute of Chicago. However, photographs and written sources—including Walter Pach's annotated New York catalogue and the Supplement to the New York catalogue located in the Armory Show records and the Walter Pach papers—indicate that around twenty–five screens were displayed during the three weeks in Manhattan, and at least nine at the Chicago exhibition.
Money, fashion, and status
His portrait, painted by his friend Guy Pène du Bois in 1915, came to epitomize the world of money, fashion and status with which he was well acquainted.
Like many women of her class, Mai Rogers Coe was a patron of artists and had a taste for the elaborate decorative works of Robert Winthrop Chanler. He painted decorative murals in Mai Coe's Bedroom (1921) and in the family's breakfast room, the Buffalo Room (1920).
Gertrude Vanderbilt and Mai Rogers Coe were perhaps Chanler's greatest patrons, but he received commissions from other wealthy families for decorative murals and screens. By 1920, when he completed the murals in the Buffalo Room, Chanler's work was well known. He later received favorable commentary in The Upholsterer and Interior Decorator magazine for his murals in Mai Coe's bedroom (1921) and in International Studio magazine for his painted screens (1922). Chanler designed murals for Gertrude's studio in Greenvale, New York, including a seaworld fantasy in the bathroom. The studio is extant and privately owned.
Around this time, Chicago industrialist James Deering commissioned him to paint an "undersea fantasy" fresco on the ceiling of the indoor/outdoor swimming pool at Villa Vizcaya (1916–1925), Deering's winter home in Miami, Florida.
Chanler's work has been compared to the fantastical works of some renaissance painters. His works involve the use of sculpted gesso, transparent glazes, and gilded finishes to produce ornate and decorative designs. His work still exists in his family’s estate, Rokeby near Barrytown, New York, the Luxembourg Museum and in private collections across the country.
In 2010, Chanler's decorative plaster ceiling at the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Studio was the focus of a conservation study by a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. The ceiling, which had been painted over numerous times, was found to contain vivid colors amidst metallic overlays and glazes.
Personal life
On April 12, 1893, he married Julia Remington Chamberlain (1872—1936), a daughter of William Chamberlain and Mary Bradhurst Remington. Julia's elder sister Alice (1868–1955) was the first wife of Robert's elder brother Lewis. They had two daughters:
- Julia Chanler (November 24, 1898 – ?)
- Dorothy Chanler (March 25, 1905 – ?)
The couple divorced on August 7, 1907. After his divorce from Julia, Chanler had a whirlwind romance with opera singer Natalina "Lina" Cavalieri (1874—1944). They married on June 18, 1910, but separated by the end of their honeymoon, and their divorce became final in June 1912. After the divorce, Lina returned to Europe afterwards where she became a much-loved star in pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg, Russia and in Ukraine.
Death
He died on October 24, 1930 in Woodstock, New York after being in a coma for twelve hours.