Robert Winthorp Chanler
Essay By: Lauren Drapala
Robert Winthrop Chanler was a larger than life figure within the American art community of the early twentieth century. Self described as an “artist decorator,” Robert Winthrop Chanler spent much of his career developing fantastical works with a team of craftspeople based out of the top floor of his Gramercy Park home at 147 East 19th Street, a place which he dubbed the House of Fantasy. Best known for his elaborately finished panels, commissioned private interiors and portraiture in his later career, at least twenty-five of Chanler’s screens held the distinction of marking the entrance to the groundbreaking International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the 1913 Armory Show. He exhibited widely in both Paris and the United States throughout his career. One of his most well known paintings, Giraffes, was acquired by the French government, joining James McNeill Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother as one of the few pieces in the French national collection completed by an American artist at the time.
Descended from longstanding patrician families in New York, Chanler and his seven siblings were known as the “Astor Orphans” following the sudden deaths of both their mother and father within two years of each other. He maintained his roots to the Hudson River Valley throughout his life and was a frequent exhibitor at the Whitney Studio Club and fixture of the Woodstock Artist Colony. After his first marriage to Red Hook-neighbor, Julia Chamberlain, Chanler experienced a very swift marriage and public divorce from notable beauty and opera singer Lina Cavalieri that dominated contemporary press for the season.
Chanler’s grandiose lifestyle endeared him to the upper echelons of society, earning him coveted private commissions for his decorative work among wealthy patrons. His interiors for Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, James Deering, Mary “Mai” and William Robertson Coe and The Colony Club survive largely intact, while most of his paintings and screens remain only within museums and private collections – very little ever offered publically. The predominance of his work in private collections have contributed significantly to Chanler’s obscurity throughout much of the twentieth century. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in his life and work in exhibitions and publication, which included The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution at the New York Historical Society in 2013-2014. A two-day symposium was hosted by Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in 2014, culminating in the 2016 book Robert Winthrop Chanler: Discovering the Fantastic (New York: Monacelli Press). His work is included among the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, the Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Museum of Art, Woodstock Artists Association Museum, Whitney Museum, New York State Museum and the Parrish Art Museum.
