The 1956 tempera-on-board portrait of Eloise, the fictional six-year-old, hammered down at Bonhams on December 5, 2018, for $100,000. The price landed at the floor of the auction house’s $100,000–$150,000 estimate in its “The World of Hilary Knight” sale. It was the first time the original artwork had traded hands since its creation.
The piece’s provenance reads like a caper novel. Hilary Knight painted the portrait as a birthday gift for Eloise co-creator Kay Thompson in 1956. Thompson loaned it to the Plaza Hotel, where it hung in the lobby until it vanished during the Junior League Ball in November 1960. Knight later recalled Thompson calling him with the explanation: “Drunken debutantes did it!” The theft made national news, with Walter Cronkite confirming the loss on the evening broadcast.
Years later, the painting surfaced in a dumpster, stripped of its frame. Knight, who had already painted a replacement for the hotel, received the recovered original but rolled it up and shoved it in a closet. He forgot about it for roughly 50 years. The artwork’s survival is a minor miracle for a tempera piece that was discarded and stored unrolled for decades.
The portrait reemerged in 2017 for an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, sparking renewed interest in Knight’s original vision. Bonhams subsequently listed it for auction. The $100,000 final bid validates the character’s enduring grip on New York’s cultural imagination, transforming a personal gift into a six-figure artifact.
While the original now sits in a private collection, the replacement oil painting Knight created still hangs in the Plaza Hotel lobby. The hotel continues to leverage the character’s legacy, ensuring that even as the physical history of the 1956 piece settles, the imaginary resident remains a fixture of the building’s public identity.