Ludwig Bemelmans

An unruly apprentice from the Tyrol

Born on April 27, 1898, in Meran in the Austrian Tyrol (now Merano, Italy), Ludwig Bemelmans grew up in the world of grand hotels before he ever made a book. His father, Lambert Bemelmans, was a Belgian painter and hotelier; his mother, Frances Fischer, was the daughter of a prosperous Bavarian brewer. Raised by a French governess until age six, Ludwig spent his early childhood in the lakeside town of Gmunden in Upper Austria before moving with his mother to her parents’ home in Regensburg after his father left the family. Formal schooling proved a disaster, and he was sent to apprentice in his Uncle Hans’s string of Tyrolean resort hotels—a tumultuous apprenticeship that ended after a violent clash with a tyrannical headwaiter left the sixteen-year-old with a choice between a reformatory and emigration to America.

Busboy at the Ritz-Carlton

Landing at Ellis Island on Christmas Eve 1914, Bemelmans found work as a busboy and waiter at the original Ritz-Carlton at Madison Avenue and 46th Street, where he broke porcelain, wore mismatched shoes, and filled the backs of order pads with caricatures of millionaire patrons and imperious maîtres d’hôtel. Under the watchful eye of dining-room captains like Monsieur Victor and melancholy waiters who had served European royalty, he absorbed the upstairs-downstairs theater of luxury hotels—material he would mine for decades in The New Yorker, Life Class (1938), and Hotel Splendide (1941).

His war with the United States

When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Bemelmans enlisted in the U.S. Army. Kept from overseas deployment because of his Austrian birth and German heritage, he served stateside as a hospital attendant, rising to corporal. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1918 and turned his wartime diaries into his first comic memoir for adults, My War with the United States (1937). Before he ever wrote a line for children, he had learned to observe two rigid institutions from the bottom up: grand hotels and the Army, each rich in rules, hierarchies, and small absurdities.

The editor who noticed the window blinds

Bemelmans’s career in children’s books began with interior decoration. In the early 1930s, while trying his hand as a commercial artist and co-owner of the Viennese-style Manhattan restaurant Hapsburg House, he tired of the bleak brick view from his downtown studio apartment and painted bright Tyrolean mountain scenes across his rolled-down window shades. When his friend Ervine Metzl brought Viking Press children’s book editor May Massee to the studio for dinner in 1933, Massee admired the painted blinds and urged him to make picture books. Hansi appeared in 1934, drawing on his Tyrolean childhood. The Golden Basket followed in 1936, inspired by memories of Belgium shared with Madeleine “Mimi” Freund, a former convent-school pupil whom he married in 1934; it earned a 1937 Newbery Honor and introduced an early row of twelve little schoolgirls in a Bruges cathedral, including one named Madeleine.

An island crash and a tavern booth

His most famous heroine came together two summers later. During a 1938 bicycle trip on the French island of Île d’Yeu, Bemelmans was knocked off his bicycle by a truck and landed in a local hospital. In the next room, a little girl recovering from an appendectomy proudly showed off her stomach scar, while cracks in the plaster ceiling above his hospital bed suggested the shape of a rabbit.

After making preliminary sketches at the Restaurant Voltaire in Paris, Bemelmans returned to Gramercy and sat down in a wooden booth at Pete’s Tavern, two blocks south of the Park at East 18th Street and Irving Place. Turning over a menu, he wrote the opening lines:

In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines
Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.

He dropped an “e” from Mimi’s name, Madeleine, to make Madeline easier to rhyme, and gave his smallest schoolgirl a fearless spirit that turned even an emergency appendectomy into a triumph. After May Massee declined the manuscript, Simon & Schuster published Madeline in September 1939. Named a 1940 Caldecott Honor Book, it launched a beloved series whose first sequel, Madeline’s Rescue (1953), won the 1954 Caldecott Medal.

A “Splendide Apartment” at the Hotel Irving

Around Gramercy Park, the Bemelmans household—Ludwig, Mimi, their daughter Barbara (born in 1936), and their black poodle Toots—turned their rooms into extensions of his easel. In 1940, the family lived at 26 Gramercy Park South, then the Hotel Irving. In a 1942 Vogue essay titled “Splendide Apartment,” Bemelmans praised the Gramercy hotel’s quiet and good service, describing a furnished apartment that cost five dollars a day. Barbara later remembered a uniformed doorman walking her across the street to unlock the iron gates of Gramercy Park.

Chestnut leaves on the fifth floor of No. 20

The family also occupied most of the fifth, top floor at 20 Gramercy Park South, on the southeast corner of the Park and Irving Place. Refusing to leave the walls bare, Bemelmans had white paper pasted over the living room walls and painted sweeping green chestnut leaves across them; in the dining room, he painted a parade of donkeys wearing real straw hats affixed directly to the plaster.

A 1942 House & Garden photograph preserves their domestic world inside the Gramercy apartment: Bemelmans lounging in espadrilles on a leopard-print sofa with Toots in his lap and six-year-old Barbara perched on the radiator cover, surrounded by a zebra-skin rug, a Confederate broadside, and paintings made by children. Here Barbara remembered her father painting for hours at his easel with a bottle of champagne chilling nearby, pecking out manuscripts on his typewriter with two fingers, and tracing his ceiling map of Paris by flashlight at night.

A lease lost to a screening room

The family’s top-floor home at 20 Gramercy Park South ended in a wartime dispute over a lease. Next door at No. 19 lived publicist and collector Benjamin Sonnenberg, who had rented the lower two floors of the historic Stuyvesant Fish house in 1931. In 1945, he bought both the No. 19 townhouse and the adjoining apartment building at No. 20, uniting the two properties into a thirty-seven-room private mansion.

Barbara Bemelmans later recalled that their landlord refused to renew the family’s fifth-floor lease because he wanted to turn their top-floor apartment into a private screening room for his guests. She believed he inspired Mr. Sunshine.

Revenge at “No. 203 Gramercy Park”

Published by Simon & Schuster in 1950, Sunshine: A Story About the City of New York begins and ends at the iron gates of Gramercy Park. At “No. 203 Gramercy Park,” Bemelmans introduced the penny-pinching landlord Mr. Sunshine, an umbrella magnate who rents his dark upstairs rooms to a gentle tenant, Miss Moore, without realizing she is opening a children’s music school.

Awakened one Thursday morning by a parade of children blasting the overture to William Tell on bassoons, horns, and drums, Mr. Sunshine schemes to evict her. After a comic misadventure involving two thousand yellow umbrellas, a sudden gale on the East River, and a real-estate technicality, Miss Moore triumphs in court—securing a lifetime lease at fifty dollars a month and turning the Gramercy house into a joyful conservatory. What a lease could not save at 20 Gramercy Park South, a picture book happily avenged.

The house has a longer story of its own. Read the GPBA history of 19 Gramercy Park South and the Sonnenberg Mansion →

Beyond the nursery shelf

Madeline’s fame can easily overshadow the breadth of Bemelmans’s work for adults. He published hotel memoirs, travelogues, and Hollywood satires such as Dirty Eddie (1947), inspired by his stint writing for MGM, alongside illustrated essays, magazine covers for The New Yorker, and features for Vogue, Town & Country, and Holiday. Behind the seemingly effortless ink line lay relentless revision: his papers at the Library of Congress preserve heavily reworked typescripts and illustrated letters, while museum exhibitions have ranged from his children’s gouaches to fabric designs and the zinc-bar sign he painted for his Paris bistro, La Colombe.

Central Park uptown, Edwin Booth at home

At the Carlyle Hotel in 1947, his brush wrapped an entire room. In exchange for eighteen months of suite accommodations for himself, Mimi, and Barbara, he painted the floor-to-ceiling murals of Bemelmans Bar, turning Central Park into a four-season panorama of ice-skating elephants, picnicking rabbits, and—tucked discreetly into one corner—Miss Clavel and her twelve schoolgirls.

While Central Park belonged to those uptown walls, his own neighborhood took center stage when he turned to oil painting in the 1950s. In December 1959, the Museum of the City of New York mounted the exhibition Bemelmans’ New York, featuring two large oils painted right on the square: Gramercy Park, Statue of Booth and Gramercy Park, Elevated, each measuring 39 by 31 inches. In his foreword to the collection, Bemelmans described placing a pot of white lilies on his windowsill overlooking the winter Park fence, framing Edmond T. Quinn’s bronze statue of Edwin Booth in the lower right corner of the canvas. Remembered through his home at No. 16, his club, and his statue at the center of the garden, Booth had become the still-life subject of another Gramercy artist.

A final studio behind No. 15

For his last New York home, Bemelmans returned to the south side of the Park. He took a working residential studio within the National Arts Club complex—located in the Club’s Studio Building at 119 East 19th Street, directly behind the Calvert Vaux mansion façade at 15 Gramercy Park South.

Even in the final months of his life, he kept working from the square. On August 5, 1962, writing to lyricist Alan Jay Lerner on stationery headed 15 Gramercy Park, he described plans to sail to Naples, stay in Capri, and bring printer’s proofs so they could “talk or just think.” For decades afterward, Barbara preserved the tools of his studio—his brushes, paints, hotel china, and Olivetti typewriter—like a room whose occupant might return at any moment.

“Tell Them It Was Wonderful”

Bemelmans died in his Gramercy Park studio-apartment on October 1, 1962, at the age of sixty-four, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in recognition of his World War I Army service. Years later, his grandson John Bemelmans Marciano wrote a biography of his grandfather and continued Madeline’s adventures for a new generation. In Gramercy, his neighborhood haunt gained a permanent marker in 1999, when the American Library Association unveiled a bronze Literary Landmark plaque outside Pete’s Tavern honoring both O. Henry and Ludwig Bemelmans.

Shortly before his death, Bemelmans wrote to his longtime Viking editor, Pat Covici, asking that his tombstone bear five words: “Tell Them It Was Wonderful.” It is a fitting benediction for an artist who found so much to celebrate right outside his door: a corner tavern table, an obstinate landlord, a bronze statue beyond the lilies, and Paris on the ceiling.