Chanler moved back to the United States in 1902 and had his first one-person exhibition in New York the following year. He bought a farm in Red Hook, NY, a village near his childhood home in Barrytown, where he worked on commissions and took part in local politics. (He would be elected Sheriff of Dutchess County, NY, five years later. His three-year term would be noted for Chanler and his “chief deputy,” the writer Richard Harding Davis, spending alcohol-fueled evenings riding madly about in chaps and ten-gallon hats in search of evildoers.)
Chanler returned to Paris in 1905, where his painting Giraffes was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne. The following year he met Getrude Vanderbilt Whitney in Paris. Their friendship and professional association would last the rest of his life, as she commissioned several works from him. Chanler returned from France in 1906, but would divide much of his subsequent life between Paris and New York.
Already tabloid fodder because of a divorce in 1907, Chanler married Natalina Cavalieri, an opera diva, in Paris in 1910. Their short-lived marriage ended in a very public divorce a couple of years later, increasing the artist’s notoriety. He lived in a house near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, a building which he christened the “House of Fantasy.” The frequent riotous parties held there were appropriately scandalous and were a prelude to the Roaring Twenties.
In 1913 a group of Chanler’s decorative screens were included in the Armory Show, the historic event that introduced European modernist art to an American audience. Over a four-year period following the show, Chanler executed decorative commissions for clients in locations ranging from Manhattan to Long Island to West Virginia to Florida. Around 1920 he purchased a home in Woodstock, NY, where he spent summers and was, with his two mistresses, a notable participant in the bohemian scene for which the art colony was famous.
In 1922 Chanler had several solo exhibitions, the most important of which was an exhibition of 54 works at the Kingore Gallery in New York, an exhibition that was accompanied by the first major catalog on the artist. By the following year, Chanler became increasingly involved in painting portraits; his preoccupation with the genre would continue for the rest of his life. He had a retrospective exhibition at Grand Central Galleries in New York in 1926. The following year, his sister donated a screen to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Larger-than-life figures have real-life bodies, alas, and all those years of partying took their toll.
The 58-year-old Chanler died in 1930, in Kingston, NY, the result of a heart attack he had suffered in Woodstock three months previously. His artistic reputation fell into obscurity as the Art Deco style grew passé in the 1930s, but the reassessment in the past generation of the Art Deco style brought new attention to his work, leading to the publication of a major monograph in 2016.
Why has Chanler only now been rediscovered? It was partly the result of his being consigned to the category of “decorative” rather than “fine” art. It was also because many of the commissions he executed for Gertrude Whitney Vanderbilt and others remained in private hands, out of sight of the general public. Another factor was that some commissions such as the swimming pool in a grotto that he designed for James Deering’s mansion “Vizcaya” in Miami suffered deterioration over the years, with conservation efforts beginning only comparatively recently. A final reason was Chanler’s turn toward portraiture in the Twenties. Portraits are notoriously hard to sell, and the current market for Chanler’s portraits is in the very low four figures.
But the line between fine and decorative art has become increasingly blurred in recent years. These days, when “curated” luxury auctions can include everything from an Abstract Expressionist painting to a game-worn Michael Jordan jersey, the definition of “important objects” seems to be up in the air. I’ll leave it to others to puzzle things out, but I look forward to my first live experience of a full-scale Chanler commission this summer, when Roberta and I plan to view his murals for the home of W.R. Coe, now part of the Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park in Oyster Bay, Long Island. I suppose that wearing chaps and cowboy hats during the pilgrimage might be an appropriate homage, but I think we’ll skip that part.
