PRESS KIT
The story of the Pan Am Sky Club Murals at Island Brasserie began in Hong Kong with Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American World Airways.
In 1965, Juan Trippe stayed at Hong Kong’s famed Mandarin Hotel. Entranced by the hotel’s famous murals of Chinese horsemen, he commissioned the artist – Hong Kong resident Gerard D’Alton Henderson – to create an 80-foot-long mural for the Sky Club of the Pan Am Building (now MetLife) in New York.
Working from a studio in the Pan Am building, Mr. Henderson filled his canvases with various ports of call of mid-19th-century Clipper ships and whaling vessels. (Clippers were a fascination for Juan Trippe, who famously named his Pan Am aircraft after them.) His completed mural was installed in 1966, where it stayed until the Sky Club’s closing in 2005. At auction, Juan’s son Ed Trippe was outbid in his effort to keep the mural “in the family,” but in a turn of fortune, the winning bidder withdrew and Ed acquired the artwork, transporting the panels to Bermuda to grace his own venture, what would begin as Tucker’s Point Hotel & Spa.
Mr. Henderson’s nautical scenes immerse diners at Island Brasserie in the seafaring heritage of some of the world’s greatest ports of call. The original mural begins with a scene of New York Harbor in the 1850s and ends with Lahaina Maui in the 1860s. In between are Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, Canton Harbour, the Port of London, Gloucester Seaport in New England, Rio de Janeiro, Constantinople, and Beirut Harbour. An eighth panel was commissioned by Ed Trippe by modern muralist Doug Bowman, who duplicated Henderson’s style in his depiction of Bermuda’s own Hamilton Harbour in the 1880s with the Spirit of Bermuda in the foreground.
