The Peacocks

Provenance
The artist, Sold to the below 1923
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, de-accessioned 1961
M. Knoedler & Co., New York
Davis Gallery, New York, ca. 1968
Mrs. Joyce Hemion, Long Island, N.Y.
By descent to her grandchild, London, until 2025

Robert Winthrop Chanler was a larger-than-life figure within the American art community of the early twentieth century. Self-described as an “artist decorator,” Robert Winthrop Chanler spent much of his career developing fantastical works with a team of craftspeople based out of the top floor of his Gramercy Park home at 147 East 19th Street, a place which he dubbed the House of Fantasy. Best known for his elaborately finished panels, commissioned private interiors and portraiture in his later career, at least twenty-five of Chanler’s works held the distinction of marking the entrance over the course of the groundbreaking International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the 1913 Armory Show. He exhibited widely in both Paris and the United States throughout his career. One of his most well-known paintings, Giraffes, was acquired by the French government, joining James McNeill Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother as one of the few pieces in the French national collection completed by an American artist at the time.

Descended from longstanding patrician families in New York, Chanler and his seven siblings grew to be known as the “Astor Orphans” following the sudden deaths of both their mother and father within two years of each other. He maintained his roots to the Hudson River Valley throughout his life and was a frequent exhibitor at the Whitney Studio Club and fixture of the Woodstock Artist Colony.

His work is included among the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, the Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Museum of Art, Woodstock Artists Association Museum, Whitney Museum, New York State Museum and the Parrish Art Museum.