his mouth, a jaunty beret on his head, a sword in each hand, and a crown, urn, and other curios looming in the background. Even when he painted a trope like an American Indian bison chase — his “Modern Buffalo Hunt (Hunting Buffalo with Automobiles)” — it featured men riding in cars and on tractors as they roared after the animals. His collection of society portraits, meanwhile, included occultist Aleister Crowley alongside the usual salon figures.

After his death following a heart attack on October 24, 1930, at the age of 59, it must have seemed like Chanler’s name would live on forever, or at least through the 20th century. Gina Wouters, curator at the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, writes that numerous factors caused this “fall into oblivion,” from“basic practicality to general cultural shifts”:

Bard College chose not to advance with an exhibition in the 1970s because of the difficulty of bringing Chanler’s work to the public eye. His murals and installations and his screens are nearly all in private estates and collections, the very audience for which they were intended. His work was not created for the masses, but rather for a refined stratum of society.

Wouters adds that the change in art tastes between the World Wars further made his bombastic art unfashionable. Then there was the fact he self-identified as a decorative artist, leaving his boundary-blurring art marooned far from a more central place in art history.

Chanler was not the only Gilded Age flame to extinguish in the later decades of the 20th century. Popular