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The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture is located in New York’s Greenwich Village, in a complex of structures assembled over an extended period of time by the American sculptor and art collector Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942). (...)

The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture is located in New York’s Greenwich Village, in a complex of structures assembled over an extended period of time by the American sculptor and art collector Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942). The building is notable for housing Whitney’s sculpture studio and for serving as the first site of the Whitney Museum of American Art, established by the artist to showcase her art collection. The Whitney Studio was remodeled between 1918 and 1923 by the decorative artist Robert Winthrop Chanler (1872–1930), who used molded plaster to transform the fireplace and ceiling into an exuberant composition of sculpted flames and low relief figures of mythical and real creatures. The figures range from from seahorses and snakes to mermaids and fire-breathing dragons, set against a background of celestial imagery. This important space has been preserved, and today is under the care of the New York Studio School. The school, a unique educational institution with a long-standing emphasis on studio work, has occupied the building since 1968.