Newly resplendent after a $100,000 cleaning, Maxfield Parrish’s King Cole mural, a masterpiece, goes back on view today in the bar of the St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue and 55th Street. A tripartite frieze of a composition, the work was commissioned in 1906 by Colonel John Jacob Astor for his Knickerbocker Hotel on 42nd Street. After the Knickerbocker closed, the painting hung in several other locations around the city before its arrival at the St. Regis in the 1930s.

In the three generations since then, the painting and its setting have become a symbol, no less than the former Palm Court of the Plaza and Bemelman’s Bar in the Carlyle, of a certain kind of New York elegance. It combines the fastidious grace of Europe with the implicit populism of the New World.

Parrish (1870–1966) was an illustrator, indeed the prince of illustrators during the discipline’s glory days at the turn of the last century. The covers of Colliers, Life, and Hearst’s were the medium through which his enchanting and enchanted visions entered the eyes and minds of the great American populace. At the same time, true to the mercantile foundations of the Gilded Age, Parrish turned his genius to brilliant effect for such companies as Edison-Mazda Lamps, Fisk Tires, and Oneida Cutlery.

Parrish, a native of Philadelphia, returned on several occasions to the theme of King Cole, but never to greater effect than in the 25-foot painting at the St. Regis, with its life-size figures. The original King Cole, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, was a British monarch who led a rebellion against the invading Roman legions. What he has to do with the bustle of grand hotels may be nothing more than the famous nursery rhyme: “Old King Cole was a merry old soul,” a sentiment that would seem to sort well with the conviviality of the bar most famous for the creation of the Bloody Mary. Certainly the king seems merry in Parrish’s depiction, as he grins to hear what is being whispered in his ear by one of the advisers — or fools — who flank him, resplendent in caps and dazzling lobster red. Seated on a grand throne whose august proportions suggest a severe Belle Epoque classicism, the smirking, bespectacled monarch is also flanked, at his feet, by two dimpled children. Behind him unfurls one of those sun-dappled utopian landscapes that appear frequently in Parrish and that are so forcefully felt and rendered as to transcend the kitsch into which they might otherwise fall.

To the king’s right stands a marvelously imagined centurion with a lance, and beyond him a young boy with a pitcher. All the way on the other side of the long composition stand the Fiddlers Three of the old rhyme. In typical fashion, Parrish has learned his compositional tricks from a study of the masters, and in his arrangement of these three figures, he makes a tasteful allusion to Raphael’s frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura. Nearby stands another lanceman, and behind him, amid a revelry of magnolias, a castle is descried in the hazy, sunlit distance that Parrish made his own, girt by those luminous clouds that were also a recurring feature of his art.

But composition and figural types were not the only thing that Parrish learned from the Old Masters. The depiction of minor details such as hands and faces are equally dazzling, in the best academic tradition.

All of Parrish’s art, but the King Cole murals to a supreme degree, admit us into a rarefied world of myth and medievalism. It is a nitrous oxide-infused delirium of joy, strident in its ambition to engender happiness at any cost. And New York City itself is a somewhat happier place for this mural’s triumphant return to the walls of the St. Regis.