A 107-year-old ceiling mural at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami will undergo a conservation and restoration project to preserve a rare work of art in a swimming-pool grotto, thanks to a grant from the National Park Service.
Built starting in 1914 as a winter home for the industrialist James Deering, whose family gained its wealth from agricultural and construction equipment, the Vizcaya estate contains a villa inspired by 18th-century properties in Italy and gardens in the style of the Italian Renaissance. It stands in an area known today as the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. Miami-Dade County acquired the property in 1952, while Deering’s heirs donated the estate’s furnishings and antiquities. A museum opened on site the following year. Vizcaya is a National Historic Landmark and has hosted Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth II (as well as many after-fair parties during Art Basel Miami Beach).
The entire property was inspired by the Mediterranean, including Vizcaya’s grotto-covered swimming pool, tucked partially under the main house. The ceiling of the grotto is covered in a mural by the artist Robert Winthrop Chanler; it is one of only three by the artist available to the public, according to the Miami Herald. The mural contains plaster casts of seashells, fish, marine plants and coral and was intended to make swimmers feel as if they were in the sea, according to the museum.
However, Chanler’s use of painted plaster to create the mural was a poor choice when it came to the longevity of the ceiling, the museum’s lead conservator, Davina Kuh Jakobi, told the Miami Herald. Plaster and water-soluble paint is “not particularly suited, not just to Florida, but to literally being above a swimming pool”, Kuh Jakobi said. Less than two years after Chanler completed the ceiling in 1917, it was already showing signs of deterioration.
The $750,000 grant, to be distributed over two years, will help the conservation team improve the substructure surrounding the grotto and carry out repairs and restoration on the ceiling mural. As part of the grant’s stipulations, the museum has pledged to match the grant. A team of four should be able to complete the ceiling in seven months, Kuh Jakobi said, with the entire project estimated to last until July 2026.
“All that work will be worth it in the end,” Kuh Jakobi said.
The grant set aside for Vizcaya is a fraction of a larger $25.7m that the National Park Service awarded this year for 59 projects under the department’s Save America’s Treasures grant programme.
