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Gilded Age grotto mural restored in the nick of time
A rapidly deteriorating 107-year-old ceiling mural on the in the swimming pool grotto of a Gilded Age mansion in Miami will be restored thanks to a $750,000 grant from the National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasures program. The grant is coming in the nick of time, because the mural was made using water-soluble paint on plaster. Yes, the mural over a pool in a grotto in sub-tropical Miami was made with materials that can’t withstand moisture.
This inexplicable choice was made by Robert Winthrop Chanler, eccentric artist and scion of several families of the American aristocracy including the Astors, Winthrops and Stuyvesants. He trained as an artist in Paris and when he returned to New York, built a successful career as a muralist to the wealthy. Today only three of his surviving murals are available to the public.
In 1916, he was commissioned by Chicago agricultural industrialist James Deering to paint a fresco on the ceiling of the swimming pool and grotto at Villa Vizcaya, his winter estate in Miami. The grotto and swimming pool is an indoor/outdoor space. Located on the north side of the house, the grotto was built underneath the first floor of the main house. The pool extends from the garden into the grotto right under the living room.
The motif of the fresco was to be undersea fantasy, coordinating with the ornate decorations of seashells, mosaics and fountains in the grotto. The idea was to make visitors feel like they were themselves sea creatures in a marine environment. Chanler created plaster casts of shells, lobsters, sea turtles, octopi and alligators to populate the ceiling. The fresco featured a seascape with fish, marine plants and coral. He used metallic paint to make the scales of the fish shine in the sun and in the reflections of the pool below.
The grotto is below sea level and afflicted by the high humidity, saline air and hurricanes endemic to Miami. Within a couple of years of its completion, the mural was already beginning to deteriorate. The decay accelerated in the humid climate, and went into overdrive when the grotto was completely submerged by storm surges in 1992, 2005 and 2017.
Saving the mural has been an uphill battle for the last 100 years, and there have been some past efforts to preserve it, Kuh Jakobi said. The two-year NPS grant will go toward getting the grotto and mural as beautiful and historically accurate as possible. But the process is not so simple. In accordance with the grant, Vizcaya pledged a match of $750,000 to deal with the first part of the project. Starting in January, the conservation team needs to deal with the corroding substructure underneath the living room floor that’s above the grotto. They’ll remove all of the objects from the room, remove the terrazzo floor panels, repair the corroding metal slab and put everything back in the room.
Then, in the grotto, they’ll re-attach the panel. And finally, there’s the tedious process of repairing and restoring the ceiling mural. While standing in the grotto, Kuh Jakobi pointed out a section of the ceiling conservators recently did a successful test run on. The difference is striking: the shades of blue are rich and vibrant and the marine life pop. Soon the rest of the mural will be just as lifelike.
It’ll take a team of four about seven months to finish the ceiling, Kuh Jakobi said. Vizcaya intends to finish the entire process by July 31, 2026, she said.
You can get a closer look at the extraordinary mural in this video by the Vizcaya Museum & Garden.
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