How Ocean House Amassed the Largest Collection of Bemelmans' Work (Hint: T&C Helped)
The legend of Ludwig Bemelmans is inextricably linked to grand hotels. He was the son of a hotelier father and, as a boy growing up in Germany with a penchant for rebellion, was sent away by his mother to apprentice for his uncle at an Austrian hotel. Then a bad altercation with the head waiter there left a 16-year-old Bemelmans, in the winter of 1914, with two choices: be shipped off to German reform school or figure it out on his own in New York. He chose the latter, making his way to the Ritz-Carlton, where not only would he find employment (as a busboy), but a creative purpose: in between shifts Bemelmans bided his time sketching the hotel's fabulous patrons. The rest, as they say, is history.
By the 1930s, he was a prolific illustrator and author (the beloved Madeline series was born in 1939), as well as a frequent contributor to Town & Country, putting his signature on cover art, personal essays, and whimsical drawings. And then there was the indelible mark he would leave at another legendary New York hotel in 1947, when he was commissioned to paint the murals of what is now his namesake bar at the Carlyle in exchange for room and board.
Which is all to say that there is something poetic about the fact that today, the largest private collection of Bemelmans's works in North America is housed in a hotel: Ocean House, arguably one of America's finest establishments. The aristocratic Victorian-style pile was built in the 1860s in the tony seaside enclave of Watch Hill, Rhode Island, for the sort of old moneyed crowd that uses the word summer as a verb. And just the sort of crowd Bemelmans himself might've relished immortalizing in paper and ink.
After falling into a state of disrepair in the early aughts, Ocean House was saved from demolition and brought back to its Gilded Age glory in 2010 by Charles and Deborah Royce, a philanthropic couple from Greenwich with little experience in hotels but great instincts for preservation.
And, it turns out, a healthy appetite for Bemelmans, for which T&C might take some credit. After seeing a series of drawings the magazine had commissioned from the illustrator—"Adieu to the Old Ritz," in our December 1950 issue (below)—on display in the windows of Bergdorf's, the Royces were sold. "It was tailor-made for Ocean House," Deborah says. "That was really the kickoff of our collection."
While Bemelmans's Madeline covers and colorful murals and irreverent sketches of social commentary have always been scattered around Ocean House for guests to discover, this month they will all be brought together into a dedicated permanent gallery space—just in time for the 125th anniversary of his birthday. (A Bemelmans suite is also forthcoming.) There are new pieces, too, including ephemera like newspaper and magazine ads from his stints doing commercial work, and family photographs.
"It's very cohesive now. What had formerly been a space that felt like a pass-through now feels like a place you'd actually like to sit down and spend time in," Deborah says. "It has enriched the life of Ocean House. There's nothing more fun than being at a hotel and exploring little corners that you don't see when you first arrive."
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