Generations and branches of the family had taken up several properties in the district, including 'Rockvale Station' with its old homestead where Chandler, along with his brother and sisters, spent much of his time as a child.
Returning from a grand tour in England and Europe with his sister Beatrice in 1952 he found that his brother David had sold the home property Rockvale Station.
Coventry’s earliest encounters with fine art were through the Howard Hinton Collection, which he saw as a schoolchild displayed in the rooms and corridors of the Armidale Teachers’ College.
[4] He progressively lined the walls of the family homestead with paintings, prints and drawings, and invited friends, art lovers and school students to visit and share his enjoyment.
[8] He mixed in Sydney's art circles and helped promote contemporary artists including Wendy Paramor, Denise Green, Dick Watkins, Leslie Dumbrell, Vernon Treweeke, and Gunter Christmann among many.
[14] Besides generously nurturing, encouraging, promoting and purchasing from individual artists, Coventry backed numerous art projects.
Chandler invited many of these visiting international artists to use his property Rockvale Station as a base, giving them an opportunity to experience the Australian bush.
In 1966 Coventry made his first donation of more than fifty works to the Armidale City Gallery,[7] now part of the New England Regional Art Museum.
Australian artists represented include Ralph Balson, Peter Booth, Gunter Christmann, Janet Dawson, Elaine Haxton, Leah MacKinnon, Michael Taylor, Dick Watkins and Brett Whiteley.
The stress of running a gallery in Sydney and a fine wool property six hundred kilometres north, while advocating and fundraising for an art museum in Armidale, brought Coventry to the decision in 1979 to sell Rockvale Station.
He maintained his interest in contemporary Australian art but it was three years before he was able to get his gallery going again with the help of his long-term partner Phillip Shepherd.
[17] A wave of new names exhibited in the gallery in the 1980s including David Larwill, Christopher Hodges, Aida Tomescu, and Nigel Thomson.
In the 1990s the gallery exhibited further new artists including Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Bronwyn Bancroft, and David Bromley.
Nigel Thomson's 1983 Archibald-Prize winning portrait of Chandler reveals a bitter and crestfallen man in a wheel-chair alone in the empty Coventry Gallery.