page_title: Robert Winthrop Chanler
section_title: Patrons and friends
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Winthrop Chanler / Career / Patrons and friends
caption_attribution_description: English: Image originally published in Queer Places: Retracing the Steps of LGBTQ people around the World Authored by Elisa Rolle This is an image of a place or building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States of America. Its reference number is 70000181
context_page_description: Robert Winthrop Chanler 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." Chanler rose to prominence as an acclaimed American artist when his work was exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show in New York City.
context_section_description: Chanler's 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).
  In 1918 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney commissioned Chanler to create a set of seven stained glass windows for her sculpture studio on MacDougal Alley in Greenwich Village. She asked Chanler to decorate the entire space and over a period of five years, he created an immense chimney-piece of three-dimensional flames, floor to ceiling, in plaster with additional inserts of bronze blazes. He covered the entire ceiling with plaster constellations and then created the windows. Chanler also designed murals for Gertrude's studio in Greenvale, New York, including a seaworld fantasy in the bathroom. The studio is extant and privately owned.
   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). 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 was close friends with Hervey White and a member of White's Woodstock artist colony in the early 1920s. White wrote of Chanler, "He could correlate his subjects in any period, the politics, sociology and art. He could illustrate with the customs of the populace, he could give incidents for illustration of his points, then break off with a personal explanation of his conduct. He was a man of great emotion and great mind." Towards the end of his life Chanler owned a house in Woodstock where he exhibited his work in local exhibitions.
caption: Chanler's murals at the Villa Vizcaya, 1916
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