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During one of the first summers I lived in New York City, in 2014, there was an exhibit at the New York Historical Society called Madeline in New York. I had grown up on Ludwig Bemelmans’ picture books, and had been named, in part, for the self-assured, red-headed Parisian school girl Madeline, whose stories charmed my sisters and parents. I was thrilled by the timing of the 2014 exhibit, which celebrated the 75th anniversary of the publication of Madeline with scores of Bemelmans’ illustrations, letters, and paintings; provided a window into his life as an Austrian émigré in New York; and illuminated his intimate relationship with the city and its glitziest hotels.
Today, nearly 60 years after his death, Bemelmans is still a household name. And while Madeline fans and New Yorkers are likely familiar with his murals at the Carlyle Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (in the eponymous Bemelmans Bar), there have been few chances to appreciate his original work in person, like I did in 2014.
In fact, the murals at Bemelmans Bar were the illustrator's only pieces permanently on display to the public. Until this spring, that is, when a new gallery of nearly 100 pieces of Bemelmans’ work—including 15 pieces from that New York Historical Society exhibit—opened to the public at Ocean House, the legendary grand dame hotel in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.
The gallery is home to the single largest private collection of Bemelmans art, courtesy of Ocean House owners and Bemelmans collectors Charles and Deborah Royce. It is complemented by a suite named in the illustrator’s honor, which was unveiled this month—just in time for the 125th anniversary of Bemelmans’ birth.
While the hotel's Bemelmans Suite houses a private gallery of its own on the walls, you do not have to be a guest at Ocean House—where rooms start at $925—to see the hotel’s collection.
The gallery, which hangs in the hotel’s lower lobby, includes 21 illustrations from Bemelmans’ “Farewell to the Ritz,” article for Town & Country magazine, which he penned when the New York City hotel closed its doors in the early 1950s. Readers of his 1941 book Hotel Splendide will recognize the cheekily drawn characters in the illustrations. The gallery also boasts two original panels Bemelmans created for Aristotle Onassis’ yacht; murals created for La Colombe bistro in Paris; architectural commissions; drawings from product campaigns; and, of course, vibrant pages from the Madeline books, including two original paintings from Madeline and The Bad Hat, black and white drawings from Madeline and The Gypsies, and sketches from Madeline in London.
This hotel setting for this new gallery is only fitting. Dubbed “the original bad boy of the New York hotel scene” by Anthony Bourdain, Bemelmans was deeply influenced by his jobs in hotels—at institutions such as the Hotel McAlpin, Hotel Astor, and the Ritz—before becoming a full-time illustrator. He grew up in them—as a child traipsing through the halls of the Austrian hotel managed by his father, and as a young teenager apprenticing at a hotel managed by his uncle. Then, at 16, a young Bemelmans immigrated to the United States, where he found work in New York hospitality. It was his tenure at the Ritz—first as a busboy, and then assistant banquet manager—that most greatly influenced his illustrations.
The hilarity, antics, and the characters—both fellow hotel employees and guests alike—were immortalized in Hotel Splendide, the charming semi-fictionalized memoir re-released by Pushkin Press last year. The book traces Bemelmans’ escapades and triumphs at the Ritz (lightly disguised as the Splendide), from the behind-the-scenes underbelly of the hotel operations to the penthouse suites.
The new Bemelmans Suite at Ocean House is not unlike the suites at the Ritz where Bemelmans would once crash overnight. Yet at Ocean House, you can sleep alongside his legacy—something Bemelmans himself likely wouldn't have imagined.
