[1] A designer and muralist, Chanler received much of his art training in France at the École des Beaux-Arts, and there his most famous work, titled Giraffes, was completed in 1905 and later purchased by the French government.

Chanler rose to prominence as an acclaimed American artist when his work was exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show in New York City.

[6] His older brother Winthrop Astor Chanler[1] served in the Rough Riders in Cuba[7] and was wounded at the Battle of Tayacoba.

[2] John Winthrop Chanler's will provided $20,000 a year for each child for life (equivalent to $470,563 in 2018), enough to live comfortably by the standards of the time.

[12] This was the exhibition that prompted critic Louis Vauxcelles to label a group of painters "fauves" (wild beasts), thus marking the birth of Fauvism.

[15] Chanler's portrait, painted by his friend Guy Pène du Bois in 1915, came to epitomize the world of money, fashion, and status with which he was well acquainted.

[17] 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.

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.

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.

In 2010, Chanler's decorative plaster ceiling at the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Studio was the focus of Lauren Drapala's Masters Thesis at the University of Pennsylvania.

[27] At Villa Vizcaya, Chanler chose to use materials such as plaster of Paris and water-soluble paint, despite the humid climate of Florida, and the work's location above a swimming pool.

[20] As of August 28, 2024, Vizcaya was awarded a $750,000 grant for conservation of the mural, as part of the Save America’s Treasures program of the National Park Service.