‘Canterbury Tales’ Mural
The scene is, literally, high art — a life-size tribute to a 600-year-old literary milestone, “The Canterbury Tales,” painted by Ezra Winter atop the walls of an Adams Building reading room.
Winter was one of America’s foremost muralists. A farm boy from Michigan, he attended the American Academy in Rome, designed camouflaging for American ships during World War I and later created works for, among others, the U.S. Supreme Court and Radio City Music Hall. He married Edna Grace Patricia Murphey Alberts, a successful businesswoman of many names and many talents who manufactured beauty products and made herself a fortune.
His life, however, would end tragically. In 1949, while painting on a scaffold in the Bank of Manhattan, Winter took a misstep and plummeted to the floor. The resulting injury left him unable to paint again, and he soon after committed suicide in the woods near his Connecticut studio.
The “Canterbury” mural — completed in 1939 and stretching 120 feet across two walls of the Adams’ north reading room — remains one of Winter’s best-known works. The scene depicts characters from Geoffrey Chaucer’s great book, a collection of 24 stories presented as a tale-telling contest among pilgrims traveling to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.
Winter shows a train of mounted figures, setting off on their journey. On the west wall, the miller pipes the group out of London, dogs nipping at the nun’s heels, the clerk engrossed in a book. The procession continues on the east wall, led by the fork-bearded merchant in a Flemish beaver hat.
Chaucer himself appears among the pilgrims, clad in a tan cloak, his back to the viewers — the creator of an ancient masterpiece, still alive on the walls of the Library.