Last spring, several friends of Hilary Knight’s, the near centenarian best known for illustrating Kay Thompson’s Eloise books, received an e-mail with an impressively polished rendering of his newest character, Sir Percy, a smartly dressed frog striking a courtly pose in the manner of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s Louis XIV. Often, artists mature into what art historians call an alter Stil (old-age style), usually characterized by freer brushwork, color, and form. If this freshly minted image was any indication, time had miraculously not altered Hilary’s supple line.
He is “more important & more interesting (to me) than Eloise … & ALL my own invention,” Hilary wrote on April 18 when I asked for more information about his pretentious amphibian. “… remember, Kay was not Child friendly … not in any way!!!! Did that make the book more appealing?? WE have so many things to plan & discuss … it would be absolutely perfect if you could come HERE!!”
Continuing in his idiosyncratic prose, with its free-style punctuation and spelling, he cited three pressing reasons for a visit, as soon as possible, to his new home in California: “[one] a piece for AIR MAIL … [two] SIR PERSEY needs an interview … [three] you need to see the huge portfolio.”
Sir Percy is “more important & more interesting (to me) than Eloise.”
In late 2019, Hilary left his Midtown Manhattan apartment, which he had occupied for nearly 60 years, to spend the winter months in the guesthouse of his niece Lily in Sierra Madre, outside Los Angeles. When the pandemic hit, his tenancy on Lily’s property was extended indefinitely.
Hilary, whose hyperactive imagination has always had a way of infiltrating real life, wrote me at one point during lockdown that he would never return to New York again, unless he traveled there by “3-hump camel.” In fact, he did return East (albeit by airplane) for a few days in November 2022 to attend the opening of his retrospective at the Norman Rockwell Museum, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
By then, Knight had also vacated Lily’s guesthouse—an involuntary exit, by ambulance, in April 2021. “Hilary became weaker and weaker,” Lily recalls. “He couldn’t even lift his hand to hold a phone. He wouldn’t eat anything but Cream of Wheat.” Frightened by his rapid decline, Lily called 911, and her uncle was dispatched to the hospital. He stayed there for a week, and then was “tossed out” unceremoniously, she says, without a diagnosis. In a single day, Lily inspected five local assisted-living facilities, and chose one (which her uncle fancifully calls “the Utopian”) close to her, on West Sierra Madre Boulevard.
The next thing Hilary knew, he was being transported on a “litter by two policemen,” he says, “each one hunkier than the next.” Actually, they were E.M.T.’s, Lily explains, carrying him on a stretcher. “It was very surreal when we arrived,” she says. “Everyone greeted us wearing sombreros because it was the fifth of May.”
“I was not too conscious,” Hilary continues. “Two Mexican nurses then threw me onto a bed, with a headboard of tufted black imitation leather, studded with rhinestones.” Lily adds, “It looked like something for a leather mama.”
In these new surroundings, Hilary felt disassociated and dehumanized. “They were constantly changing my didies. I needed to be cleaned up, so they put me in the shower, and put the shower thingy up my rear end. It was the first time I had a woman shower me. I felt like a laboratory frog, the ones I remember from science class in school [Friends Seminary, on East 16th Street]. So that is how Sir Percy was born.”
With his strength coming back, Hilary coped with his bewildering new circumstances by drawing himself experiencing them. “But then I thought it would be funnier to make him a frog,” he explains. Unlike with Eloise, who he says “was never me,” Sir Percy’s and Hilary’s identities are now so merged that the bug-eyed creature’s bedroom slippers are just as likely to be embroidered with a K for Knight as a P for Percy.
“I have no idea where the name ‘Sir Percy’ comes from,” Hilary says, “unless I was inspired by Barry Humphries’s vulgar Australian character ‘Sir Les Patterson.’” (Hilary illustrated Humphries’s Dear Dame Edna advice column in Vanity Fair from 2001 to 2003.) “But Sir Percy gave himself the title,” Hilary notes. “He is a poseur, a fraud. Sir Percy really came from a bog in Ireland.”
Time has miraculously not altered Hilary Knight’s supple line.
In spite of its pseudonym, the Utopian, whose fees are paid for by a Texan friend, resembles a hacienda more than a haven. The collaged sign posted outside Hilary’s room, No. 131, suggests that the accommodations within are crowded with residents ranging widely in age and species.
Pasted together on this gilt-framed nameplate, concocted by the artist, are a photo of Hilary labeled “Nov 1 1926”; a drawing of Eloise dated “Nov 4 1954”; a snapshot of “my roommate Tousey,” his tabby cat, marked “Febru 28 20”; and a masked man posing as Sir Percy (no birth date given).
As privacy is not given primary consideration at the Utopian, a visitor may enter without knocking. Inside, Hilary reclines on his bed (no longer the “leather mama” one) beneath an elegant 1930s painting of exotic birds, an ibex, and lush foliage by his mother, the decorative artist Katherine Sturges. Hilary recently found the painting, executed, he recalls, at the Knights’ apartment at 43 Fifth Avenue, after searching for it for half a century. He traded two Eloise drawings with the descendants of its original purchaser for it, he says, although they hadn’t asked for anything in return.
“Langour becomes me,” he drawls by way of a greeting; it’s a reference to a Mae West line from Klondike Annie, one of a vast repertoire of screen-goddess quips for which Hilary still has total recall. Dozens of his Sir Percy sketchbook drawings, most protected by plastic sleeves, are fanned out on the bed, and Tousey the tabby is walking on top of them.
Tousey is banished to the bathroom, where the beginnings of a life-size canvas of Sir Percy lean against a wall. Otherwise, the bathroom walls are adorned with studio shots of Hilary’s favorite movie stars (Mamie Van Doren, his “ideal woman”; Veronica Lake; and Ilona Massey); more Sir Percy sketches; and another painting by his mother.
“I should have made it smaller,” he says about the unfinished official Sir Percy portrait. “It’s hard for me now to work on such a large scale. But Sir Percy thinks he is human-size, not frog-size. He always gets everything wrong, always fantasizing about life. If he doesn’t know about something, he just makes it up. And there is nothing nice about Sir Percy. At all,” he adds.
A plastic shower curtain printed with the French artist Bernard Boutet de Monvel’s 1935 Diana and Actaeon (which Hilary considers to be “the greatest piece of decorative art” ever made) separates the living area of the compact suite from Hilary’s studio. This pocket-size atelier is set up with a worktable, paints, brushes, and storage for Katherine Sturges’s oeuvre. His mother, who also designed textiles (examples of which are in the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute), “taught me about fantasy,” he says, while Reginald Marsh, his teacher at the Art Students League, in Manhattan, “taught me how to draw. He believed that the looser a drawing is, the better.”
Of the dozens of Sir Percy sketches still scattered on the rumpled bed, only a handful so far are finished. “I keep getting new ideas,” he says. “One idea overtakes the other, and then I’m on to something else.”
But for AIR MAIL, Hilary agreed to complete 30 Sir Percy scenes, and compile them into a slideshow prototype for a picture book. “My great fear is to lose my technique,” he explains. “I watched it happen to my mother and father,” the accomplished aviation illustrator Clayton Knight. “That’s why I keep working. I’m 96. I’m old! I never realized that until I got here.”
Nonetheless, he has further work and travel in mind. He would like to see his long-planned project, the tongue-in-cheek cabaret “Tails,” featuring a variety of scantily clad performers, produced. And he intends to go to India when he turns 100.
“I know that these are fantasies more extreme than any of Sir Percy’s,” he acknowledges. “We both think we can do anything, that if you make a firm statement, it becomes a fact. I believe if I say something often enough, it will happen”—just as, inevitably, our meeting at the Utopian and the publication of The Adventures of Sir Percy in AIR MAIL did.
Hilary Knight is a writer and artist. He lives in Sierra Madre, California, where he is continuing work on his Sir Percy character
Amy Fine Collins is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL. She is the author of The International Best-Dressed List: The Official Story
