Like
Mai Rogers Coe and
Everett Shinn, Chanler was staying in Paris in the 1890s and became involved with the art community. Chanler specialized in painted screens and was a member of the
National Society of Mural Painters. A ceiling mural of buffaloes painted by Chanler is in the Coe House in
Brookville, New York. He was also a member of the
Architectural League of New York. He painted a ceiling inside the
Colony Club, a private member's club located at Park Avenue and 62nd Street in New York City. This was the exhibition that prompted critic
Louis Vauxcelles to label a group of painters "
fauves" (wild beasts), thus marking the birth of
Fauvism.
The Armory Show Chanler's work was featured in the 1913 Armory Show in New York, and he was one of the most acclaimed American artists in the exhibition. The elaborately painted screens he submitted were placed near the entrance of the show (Gallery A), where they captured the attention of the public and critics. Chanler's screen titled
Hopi Indian Snake Dance was reproduced in the
New York Herald, 15 February 1913. A work titled
Porcupines was reproduced on postcard made for the Armory Show. Another screen by Chanler depicting porcupines is currently in the collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. According to the catalogues for the Armory Show, Chanler was represented by nine screens at the New York venue and eight screens at the
Art Institute of Chicago, but photographs and written sources, including
Walter Pach's annotated New York catalogue and the Supplement to the New York catalogue located in the Armory Show records and the Walter Pach papers, indicate that around 25 screens were displayed during the three weeks in Manhattan, and at least nine at the Chicago exhibition. Like many women of her class, Mai Rogers Coe was a patron of artists and had a taste for the elaborate, decorative works of Robert Winthrop Chanler. He painted decorative murals in Mai Coe's bedroom (1921) and in the family's breakfast room, the Buffalo Room (1920). In 1918,
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney commissioned Chanler to create a set of seven
stained glass windows for her sculpture studio on
MacDougal Alley in
Greenwich Village. She asked Chanler to decorate the entire space and over a period of five years, he created an immense chimney-piece of three-dimensional flames, floor to ceiling, in plaster with additional inserts of bronze blazes. He covered the entire ceiling with plaster constellations and then created the windows. Chanler also designed murals for Gertrude's studio in
Greenvale, New York, including a seaworld fantasy in the bathroom. The studio is extant and privately owned. , 1916 Gertrude Vanderbilt and Mai Rogers Coe were perhaps Chanler's greatest patrons, but he received commissions from other wealthy families for decorative murals and screens. By 1920, when he completed the murals in the Buffalo Room, Chanler's work was well known. He later received favorable commentary in
The Upholsterer and Interior Decorator magazine for his murals in Mai Coe's bedroom (1921) and in
International Studio magazine for his painted screens (1922). Around this time, Chicago industrialist
James Deering commissioned him to paint an "undersea fantasy"
fresco on the ceiling of the indoor/outdoor swimming pool at
Villa Vizcaya (1916–1925), Deering's winter home in
Miami,
Florida. Chanler was close friends with
Hervey White and a member of White's Woodstock artist colony in the early 1920s. White wrote of Chanler, "He could correlate his subjects in any period, the politics, sociology, and art. He could illustrate with the customs of the populace, he could give incidents for illustration of his points, then break off with a personal explanation of his conduct. He was a man of great emotion and great mind." Towards the end of his life, Chanler owned a house in
Woodstock, where he exhibited his work in local exhibitions. ==Personal life==