American Sculpture and the Decorative Arts

Artist: Robert W. Chanler


Giraffes
1905
Print from the Digital Picture Collection of the New York City Library

1913 Armory Show
Robert W. Chanler
American, 1872-1930
Screen, Leopard and Deer

1913 Armory Show
Robert W. Chanler
American, 1872-1930
Screen, Porcupine

Robert Winthrop Chanler (1872–1930)
Screen: Porcupines [and] Nightmare
1914
Oil on wood
69 1/2 x 48 1/4 in. (175.8 x 122.2 cm)

Robert W. Chanler
(1872 - 1930)
Parody of Fauve Painters
in the Armory Show
1913
oil on masonite
38 1/2 x 45 1/2"
Courtesy of the Woodstock
Artists Association
Permanent Collection

Works Chanler purchased at the Armory Show.

Odilon Redon
French, 1840-1916
Bataille, 1865
etching and drypoint, 2 15/16 x 5 3/16.

Odilon Redon
French, 1840-1916
Fear (La Peur), c. 1865
etching, 5 1/2 x 8 13/16.

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso
Portuguese, 1887-1918
Before the Bullfight (Avant la corrida), (1912).

Constantin Brancusi
Rumanian, 1876-1957
Mademoiselle Pogany, 1912
white marble.
Chanler purchased a similar piece.

Robert Winthrop Chanler

Biography from AskART:

Born in New York City, Robert Chanler, a designer and muralist, received much of his art training in France at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and there his most famous work titled Giraffes was completed in 1905 and later purchased by the French Government.

Chanler specialized in painted screens and was a member of the National Society of Mural Painters. A ceiling mural of buffaloes is in the Coe House in Brookville, New York. He was also a member of the New York Architectural League.

At the 1913 Armory Show, he exhibited a painted screen entitled Hopi Snake Dance, which was used at the Show at the transition area--to ease the shock-- to the Fauves part of the exhibition. Chanler's screens were whimsical with swans and leopards in black, white and silver, and his style was regarded as modern but not extreme.

Of his 'in-between' position at the Armory Show, it was written that ". . .the public found that half-way station more comfortable than the uncompromising radicalism of the Fauves and Cubists. The colorful decorative screens of Chanler won instant popularity although only one of them sold." (Brown, 135)

He was a descendant of Colonial politicians including Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts and Peter Stuyvesant, last Dutch governor of New York. He had an early dedication to politics but changed to art.

Sources:
Peggy and Harold Samuels, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West
Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art
Milton Brown, The Story of the Armory Show

Astor Orphans: A Pride of Lions by Lately Thomas






Robert ("Sheriff Bob") Chanler and Hervey White, 1924
The Maverick Festival, Woodstock, 1915-1931

New York City - Greenwich Village
( Originally Published 1924 )

Of course no one passing through East Nineteenth Street could miss the residence of Robert Chanler, familiarly known to his friends as Sheriff Bob Chanler. It suffices but to glance to the left side, until one sees a painted giraffe in bas-relief over his portal, with its curious heavy set-in door, looking very much like the entrance to a fortress, to know immediately one is before an original existence. But this is not half as interesting as the man living within. Big, curly-headed, heavy Bob Chanler, looking very much like the picture of the elder Dumas, is one of America's greatest decorative painters and the scion of one of the oldest American families. Weary and tired, I have many a time knocked at his door and been received in as friendly a fashion as if it were an oasis in the desert and he the Arab owner of the tent. And something better than dates and camel's-milk has always been offered to me.

What a man and what a house! From the stairway to the studio in the garret, it is decorated and painted in the most fantastic way, with serpents and grotesque animals crawling over one another in the most vivid and subtle colors, red tongues hanging from leaping dragons, and porcupines embossed in gold jumping over one anther—Naiads and sylphs and giraffes and elephants, pell-mell, grouped only because of harmony of color and movement and not because of the natural proximity of their habitats. All that is weird is painted on that stairway.

The rooms are full of costly furniture, old and antique, just holding together. The walls are done in sudden patches of yellow and black, and the color-scheme of the ceilings is deliberately a mystifying one. And then suddenly the large studio on the roof, in which Bob is working away at the most unusual hours, leaving occasionally a gathering of friends at the dinner-table, in the midst of the most hilarious or serious conversation, to go up to his studio and daub a few brushes here and there, on one of the numerous huge decorative canvases at which he is working simultaneously.

And there is no telling what Bob might say or do. Garbed in a pair of loose denims, over which hangs an ample Russian blouse buttoned securely at the neck, with a sash around it, a pair of loose babouches on his feet, he sits for hours on his heels upon the couch, apparently oblivious to all that is going on about him. But suddenly something strikes. He jumps up. He slips away into his work-room or to his bed to sleep.

I do not want to say that visitors are welcome. But they are very frequently welcome when there is one of Chanler's exhibitions of his screens on the lower floor of the building. And if one should be so favored as to be invited for one of his evenings, one may be certain of meeting what is most distinguished in the world of art and letters.

ROBERT WINTHROP CHANLER (American, 1872-1930) Fine Art Deco three-panel folding screen, 1928, dramatically-painted with two zebras on one side in black and tan on ivory ground, the back decorated with diagonal stripes in black with silver foil. (Broadway composer Kay Swift and her husband James P. Warburg commissioned Chanler to execute this piece for their New York home. A recently-released biography on Kay Swift, titled "Fine and Dandy: The Life and Work of Kay Swift" is included with this lot and contains a photo of the screen shown in a 1970s interior. This piece descended through Ms. Swift's family). Signed and dated on front, lower right. Each panel: 78" x 21 3/4"

Portrait of a Titan

Time Magazine
Monday, Apr. 21, 1930

New York artists, writers, musicians heard cheering news last week: Bob Chanler was better, Bob Chanler was out of bed again. Dozens of them went down to offer their congratulations to one of the greatest painters, one of the most spectacular characters in the U. S. They found him, majestic in a long pink nightgown and shaggy thatch of white hair, sipping a stiff hooker of brandy, and playing Russian Bank with small, vivacious Mile Suzanne Tirlier, otherwise "Tilly," his secretary.

"H'ar ye!" he rumbled. "Haven't been out of bed for weeks. Damned if I'm going back to bed for anybody!"

Robert Winthrop Chanler was born auspiciously enough on Washington's Birthday, 1873. His family was and still is socially prominent in apple-raising Dutchess County (above & east of Poughkeepsie), New York—a family full of "characters" and legends, a wealthy family that can indulge its eccentricities. At the age of ten Bob drew an indubitable horse on a large piece of paper, took it into the parlor for his parents to admire. They refused to believe that he had done it, punished him for lying. Discouraged, he did not try to draw again, for another 25 years.

When he was 22 he married Julia Chamberlain, younger sister of his brother Lewis Stuyvesant ("Loulou") Chanler's first wife, and went to Paris. It was there that he started seriously to paint, studied at the Beaux Arts.

"I became an artist because I was weak," he explains. "Too thin. Too tall. Sick. Art is a profession for the weak?"

Discouraged with his first portraits, he turned to mural decoration "because there seemed to be a call for that sort of thing." Shortly thereafter he got a divorce, and, exhilarated, turned out an amazing series of panels and screens, one of which, showing a horde of giraffes nibbling the tender branches of birch trees, now stands in the Luxembourg Museum.

"Uncle Bob," explains a younger member of the family, "always painted best after his divorces."

Came another period of depression. He went back to Dutchess County, gave up painting, went into politics, ran for county sheriff. Having his own ideas of practical politics he eschewed such devices as bribing the electorate with drinks, kissing babies. Robert Winthrop Chanler bought a bull, the finest bull he could afford, and serviced all the farmers' cows gratis. The bull not only won him the election but kept him in the State Legislature for six years. He left politics when his brother "Loulou" was defeated for Governor of New York State by middleaged, ginger-whiskered Charles Evans Hughes.

Sheriff Bob went back to painting. Followed a second marriage to the tempestuous primadonna Lina Cavalieri. Another brother, John Armstrong Chanler, had attracted no little attention by running amuck, shooting his butler, and effecting a spectacular escape from the Bloomingdale Hospital for the Insane (Manhattan). He fled to Virginia, was judged legally sane, changed his name to "Chaloner" and set a brass plate in his dining room floor "To the Memory of a Faithful Servitor." No sooner did the news of Artist Bob's marriage to the spectacular Cavalieri reach Virginia than Brother John sent his most famous telegram: WHO'S LOONY NOW?

Came another divorce. La Cavalieri married Tenor Lucien Muratore. Artist Bob erupted in a flood of murals. He designed stained glass windows, painted screens, covered the walls of tycoons' swimming pools and conservatories with a profusion of birds and beasts in brilliant dynamic color, all the while eating, drinking, living with gargantuan gusto. No one house was big enough for this titan. He bought three brownstone houses on East 19th Street, Manhattan, knocked them together and covered every inch of wall space with his own paintings. There are palm trees and parrots in the pantry, a dado of chimpanzees climbs up the stairs, round the walls of the yellow dining room stalks a procession of tall Mexican goddesses with bird heads. Night after night these rooms were filled with the intelligentsia, the talking, drinking, reciting, bright people of an inner world, while Bob Chanler sat on the floor, disheveled and benign like Praxiteles' Zeus.

Two years ago he fell ill. Thorough in everything, he was thorough in his sicknesses. He had cirrhosis of the liver, heart failure and kidney trouble all at once. His eyes and teeth also went back on him. For weeks at a time he can only sleep upright in a chair, his great grey head resting on his arms. According to all the laws of medicine he should have died a year ago. Between attacks he continues to paint, portraits now. Modern critics, incidentally, prefer these to his murals. His peacocks, sharks, panthers and zebras were magnificently alive, but there were often too many of them on a screen. His portraits are just as vital, just as colorful, but since he can only work for an hour and a half at a time, they have the added merit of extreme simplicity.

The friends whom he entertained so lavishly have not forsaken him. Every evening the invaluable "Tilly" summons a different couple to play bridge on the counterpane of his enormous bed. Orchidaceous Novelist Carl Van Vechten stops in from time to time to emit epigrams. Bearded Georges Barrere, Little Symphony Conductor, comes to play the flute. Most faithful is New York's Chief Medi-cal Examiner, Dr. Charles ("Buck") Norris.

Young artists amaze and excite him.

"These fellows," said he, "do the sort of thing I try to do consciously, instinctively. I find that I've already become a myth. A legend, that's what I am. It would be amusing to write about me as a sort of Living Dead Man."

Died. Robert Winthrop Chanler, 57, portraitist, mural painter, onetime (1903) sheriff of Dutchess County, N. Y., wholehearted Rabelaisian (TIME, April 21); of heart failure, at Woodstock, N. Y. A great-grandson of John Jacob Astor related to three other venerable New York families (the Stuyvesants, Beekmans, Livingstons), he painted vivid, crowded screens, some of which were bought by the Metropolitan Museum in New York the Luxembourg in Paris. He decorated ballrooms, bedrooms, swimming pools for many a tycoon. Of his three brothers, William Astor was an African explorer, had his leg amputated because it bothered him; John Armstrong (Chaloner) made a spectacular escape from Bloommingdale Asylum, changed his name, lives now in Virginia, legally sane; a third, Lewis Stuyvesant became Lieutenant Governor ot New York. Giant, genial Brother Bob got elected sheriff by servicing farmers cows with a prize bull. He used to hunt for robbers at night disguised as a cowboy. He was married twice (once, briefly, to famed Diva Lina Cavalieri). He had innumerable friends, knocked three town houses together to have room for his mass studio parties which have become Manhattan legend.

Portrait
Oil on canvas
h: 48 x w: 36 in / h: 121.9 x w: 91.4 cm