Susan's Cabinet: Ezra Winter's Murals

World literature murals, main reading room of the Birmingham Library, 1929

Ezra Winter (1886 -1949) was an extremely successful artist whose colossal murals can still be seen at such majestic locales as Radio City Music Hall, the Library of Congress, the U. S. Supreme Court, Detroit’s fabulous Guardian Building, the Metropolitan Tower in Chicago…and the Birmingham Public Library.

Winter was a national celebrity; he was handsome and rich. His life was the stuff of Hollywood movies – lowly birth, rise to fame, sensational love affairs, wild parties, an attic studio/home above Grand Central Station, an expedition to the Antarctic, an absurd accident, and suicide.

Ezra Winter

Photo from the Smithsonian Institution Archives

Winter was born into a farming family in Michigan (after his father died); he graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago; he married a model; and he was awarded a prestigious 3-year art residency in Rome right out of art school. During World War I he designed camouflage for the U.S. Shipping Board, and he began to get painting commissions. In 1920, six months after the birth of his third daughter, he left his wife and children. His career continued to flourish and he married again – to Edna Patricia Murphey Albert, a divorcee and entrepreneur who developed an antiperspirant for women, marketed it, branched into other beauty products, and earned millions. They moved to the Connecticut countryside where she then built an herbal empire. Winter had more commissions than he could handle, even through the Great Depression, although he was not in step with the popular Modernism movement.

“Fountain of Youth” 40 ft x 60 ft, Radio City Music Hall, 1932

Photo from artistandstudio.com

“Michigan and Her Industries,” Guardian Building, Detroit, 1929

Wow, I would love to visit this Art Deco, Mayan Revival building!

Photo by Ash, Flickr

During WWII the demand for his murals subsided, while his wife’s career flourished. He still had commissions but on a smaller scale. In 1949 he was working on the last of seven murals for the Bank of Manhattan when, forgetting he was on scaffolding, he stepped back and fell. He fractured his tailbone which was inoperable and painful. His health began to go downhill. In pain, and with an unsteady hand, he was unable to paint. A month after the accident, at the age of 63, he shot himself. He left behind a magnificent body of work, some of which can be seen just a 90-minute drive from Huntsville.

Birmingham Public Library

After 57 years as the library’s central facility, this building was renamed the Linn-Henley Research Library and connected to a new, much larger library building across the street.

Birmingham’s first free-standing central library, a 4-story Beaux Arts building, opened in 1927. (The library was previously housed in City Hall and destroyed by fire in 1925.) The famous Ezra Winter was commissioned to paint a series of murals depicting figures from world literature for the main reading room, as well as a mural depicting fairy tales for the children’s room. As with most of his work, he painted the murals on canvas in his studio (New York in this case). In 1929 they were affixed to the walls of the library with white lead while Winter supervised. He also painted the decorative ceilings.

During the 1985 renovation the original ceiling decoration

was replaced with duplicate wallpaper

You can get a better look at the murals from the second-floor balcony.

Closeups of the children's room mural (photos by the Birmingham Public Library):

This entire library is gorgeous; even the hallways are beautiful, with marble floors, decorative metal work, and copies of famous art works such as Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Capitoline She-wolf with Romulus and Remus.

More of Winter's murals:

Nautical-themed ceiling murals in the Great Hall of the Cunard Steamship Company building in Manhattan, 1919. Passengers bought tickets for the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth here. Photo from from thecityreview.com