Portrait of a Titan

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."

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