"An eccentric who lived the bohemian artist lifestyle to the hilt, as well as an artist whose work was prized by the elite and celebrated in the influential 1913 Armory Show.... Chanler was an icon of his time. Now his name is almost forgotten. Recent restoration of his huge plaster murals [at the Vizcaya Museum] has encouraged a new appreciation for his otherworldly art, where exotic animals sketched from his own Manhattan menagerie were painted in metallic hues, often joined by cosmic shooting stars and planets. .....
"..... During his life, he was a very public figure, born into the Astor family, with ancestors donning old New York names like Winthrop and Stuyvesant. He had a couple of disastrous marriages, covered extensively by the press, and posing for a portrait in his studio became the stuff of legend."
One such sitter was Carl Van Vechten.
"Betsy Fahlman, professor of art history at Arizona State University, cites ....the portrait sitting of Carl Van Vechten in April of 1928, a scene of absurdist debauchery that would surely make Salvador Dalí jealous.
"After a lunch featuring “bowls of succulent rice and curry and huge pitchers of Bronx cocktails,” Van Vechten steps up on a stage. Blues music wails from a record player, Yorkshire terriers wrestle alongside, while in another corner “a poet composes verse on the top rung of a meaningless ladder; in the center of the floor a flamboyant female is making Shanghai gestures.” And there is the artist himself, whom Van Vechten vividly describes:
"'All the time Bob is painting, painting like hell!! He slings paint against the canvas, hurls it in sadistically until you wonder why it doesn’t go clean through, while he carries a running commentary of his method: “Work like hell. Never know anything. More I learn, more I forget. No good painter ever knew anything. Bad painters know. Try this blue for shadow on the nose: may come out right. Can’t be sure. Rotten! Try red. Try green. Hell!'”
........
"His collection of society portraits, meanwhile, included occultist Aleister Crowley alongside the usual salon figures."
Chanler's art gives us a chance to consider a product of money and imagination. An artist could become rich as John Singer Sargent did. Sargent painted a sister of Robert Winthrop Chanler's: Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler. But we mean Chanler as an example of one born to money. His art was prominently displayed at the entrance to the 1913 Armory Show. This is an example, titled "Leopard and Deer."
More examples of Chanler's work are here.
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