Gilded Age cave paintings restored at the last minute

A 107-year-old ceiling mural in a pool grotto at a Gilded Age Miami mansion is rapidly decaying, thanks to a $750,000 grant from the National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasures program. The grant couldn’t come at a better time, since the mural was painted with water-soluble paint on plaster. That’s right, the mural above a pool in a grotto in subtropical Miami is made of a material that doesn’t stand up to moisture.

This puzzling choice was made by Robert Winthrop Chanler, an eccentric artist and scion of several American aristocrats, including the Astors, Winthrops, and Stuyvesants. He trained as an artist in Paris, and upon his return to New York, he became a successful muralist, painting murals for the wealthy. Today, only three of his remaining murals are available for the public to admire.

In 1916, he was commissioned by Chicago agricultural industrialist James Deering to paint the ceiling of the swimming pool and grotto at Villa Vizcaya, his winter estate in Miami. The grotto and swimming pool are indoor/outdoor spaces. The grotto is located on the north side of the house, built below the first floor of the main house. The swimming pool extends from the garden to the grotto just below the living room.

The theme of the mural is an undersea fantasy, which coordinates with the cave’s ornate shell, mosaic and fountain decorations. The goal was to make visitors feel like they were marine creatures in an ocean environment. Chanler made plaster casts of shells, lobsters, turtles, octopuses and crocodiles to decorate the ceiling. The mural features a seascape with fish, marine plants and corals. He used metallic paint to make the fish’s scales shimmer in the sunlight and in the reflection of the pool below.

Located below sea level, the Grotto is subject to Miami’s unique high humidity, saline air, and hurricane-force winds. Within a few years of the murals’ completion, they began to decay. The humid climate accelerated the decay process, which was further exacerbated when the Grotto was completely flooded by storm surges in 1992, 2005, and 2017.

Saving the murals has been an uphill battle over the past 100 years, Kuh-Jacoby said, and there have been some efforts to preserve them in the past. The two-year NPS grant will be used to make the grottoes and murals as beautiful and historically accurate as possible. But the process isn’t that simple. Under the grant, Viscaya has pledged $750,000 in matching funds to handle the first part of the project. Starting in January, the conservation team will need to deal with the corroded substructure beneath the living room floor above the grottoes. They will remove all items from the room, remove the terrazzo floor, repair the corroded metal panels, and put everything back in the room.

Then they’ll reinstall the panels in the grotto. Finally, there’s the tedious process of repairing and restoring the ceiling frescoes. Standing in the grotto, Kuh-Jacobi noted that the ceiling restorers had recently conducted a successful partial test run. The change was striking: The blue hues were rich and vibrant, and the sea creatures were lifelike. Soon, the rest of the frescoes will be just as lifelike.

Kuh Jakobi said it would take a team of four about seven months to complete the construction of the ceiling. Vizcaya intends to complete the process by July 31, 2026, she said.

You can see this extraordinary mural up close in this video from the Veskaya Museum and Gardens.