While he encouraged them to develop expertise in one particular area, Sachs declared, “Every self-respecting museum man must have a bowing acquaintance with the whole field of Fine Arts.”21 He taught his students to be curious about everything they saw and to develop an eye for the authentic. One exercise was to identify within four minutes which of a selection of objects on the table – a piece of brocade, a bronze object, a Buddha, a handle, a pestle – was actually made within the last fifty years. He asked them to select an object and make a case for its acquisition to an imaginary board of trustees. He trained them to develop their visual memories by asking them to list all the pictures on the second-floor galleries of the Fogg in the order of their appearance, adding to this their provenance, condition, and aesthetic value.
Sachs’s students also needed to understand what went into the running of a museum from inside out and from top to bottom. He asked them to make architectural renderings of the Fogg’s floor plans to better understand the particular logic of a museum building. He taught them how to catalogue collections, organize exhibitions, and write press releases. He assigned research papers on a variety of topics and added to this bibliographies, class presentations, and gallery talks. He taught them to compare collections from all over the world, to have a working knowledge of what was where. One assignment was to list every single French painting in America. It was “a hothouse treatment,”22 remembered Rathbone, one that made the students realize at once how little they had learned of the real world as Harvard undergraduates.
A museum is as good as its staff, Sachs used to say, and he meant this to apply to every level of its management. Perry observed that Sachs considered “some of our number rather too privileged,”23 and that it wouldn’t hurt them to get a taste of the less glamorous side of museum work. Sachs introduced them to janitorial duties, stressing the importance of keeping “a tidy ship.”24 Students were asked to take turns arriving early in the morning with the maintenance staff and then follow the superintendent around, dusting the cabinets and sweeping the floors.
Sachs also insisted that students be closely acquainted with artistic techniques. To that end Edward Forbes conducted a laboratory course in Methods and Processes of Italian Painting, more familiarly known as “egg and plaster.” Forbes taught them how to paint in egg tempera and how to prepare a gesso panel, how to handle the esoteric materials and how to use the tools of the old masters such as the wolf’s tooth. He introduced them to the technique of gilding, of painting on parchment, and the methods of fresco – both fresh and secco – using the walls of his classroom at the Fogg Museum as their practice ground.
They visited and reported on neighboring museums such as the Worcester Art Museum and the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. And during the Christmas and spring breaks Sachs led his students on field trips to New York, Philadelphia, and Washington to meet dealers, collectors, and museum curators, including some of his former students who by now were well and highly placed.
Edward Forbes’s Methods and Processes of Painting class, 1933–1934. LEFT TO RIGHT: James S. Plaut, Perry T. Rathbone, Henry P. McIlhenny, Katrina Van Hook, Elizabeth Dow, Charles C. Cunningham, Professor Edward W. Forbes, Mr. Depinna, John Murray.
They visited the collection of the Widener family at Lynnewood Hall outside Philadelphia, where the entire class of twenty-eight was given lunch and waited on by footmen in livery. They were served tea at Grenville Winthrop’s townhouse in New York City, where they viewed his unrivaled collection of nineteenth-century French paintings and sixth-century Chinese sculptures and jades. Sachs assured his students that the collector would be more than happy to tell them how he came upon this jade or that picture. “Look around,” Sachs would say. “Ask any questions you like.”25 They were welcomed at Abby Rockefeller’s townhouse on West Fifty-Fourth Street, the first home of the Museum of Modern Art. They called on Joseph Duveen, the premier dealer in old master pictures, at his stone palace at the corner of Fifty-Sixth and Fifth. Duveen would appear in his morning coat, surrounded by his faithful assistants. “The great Lord Duveen would crack a few jokes and show us a few treasures,”26 remembered Rathbone, and he could easily see the magic this dealer worked on his wealthy clients, especially the legendary superrich of the older generation such as Frick, Morgan, Widener, and Huntington. In Washington they were personally welcomed by the curators of the National Gallery and of Dumbarton Oaks, and the collectors Duncan and Marjorie Phillips. These were the kind of receptions Paul Sachs had come to expect – and his students to enjoy – from the extensive network he had developed over decades.
A scholar may work in solitude, but a museum professional needs to be out working in the world, and Sachs never ceased to stress the importance of personal contacts. He shared his long list of leading art world figures with his students, including his careful instructions on how European nobility should be addressed, as in “My dear Contesse Beausillon” or “My dear Lord Crawford.” While it was easy to recognize the great collectors, Sachs also taught them to never condescend to the lesser known, never to “high-hat”27 the amateur, for they might very well know more than you assume, and their resources and potential for support were inestimable.
Likewise Sachs told his students to become familiar with their trustees and to visit them in their own homes. Equally important, it was essential to know how to entertain them. When an important out-of-town visitor came to Cambridge, Sachs hosted black-tie dinners at Shady Hill, inviting his students to these lavish affairs to show them both how to dress properly and how to create the right atmosphere for cultivating the rich. Last but not least, he encouraged them to become collectors themselves at whatever level they could afford. Rathbone’s classmate Henry McIlhenny, coming from a family of considerable means in Philadelphia, had already purchased a major still life by Chardin, which he hung over the fireplace in his suite at Dunster House. Rathbone’s budget could accommodate only the odd Japanese block print to be found in secondhand bookshops, but those thrilled him just as much. It was not until his senior year that he acquired his first oil painting – a primitive American portrait of a dark-haired gentleman dressed in black. For this stern Yankee – later attributed to Sheldon Peck and today valued at five thousand times what he bought it for in 1932 – he paid five dollars to a roadside antique dealer in upstate New York.
Sachs embraced his students as if they were his own children. As in any family there were inevitably some children who were easier to manage than others. It was difficult for Sachs to assert his superiority over the three students who had started the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art – Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker – partly because they belonged to the same close-knit New York (and largely Jewish) society that Sachs did. Warburg considered Sachs “a humorless little cannonball of energy,”28 Walker called him a “stocky, strutting little man,”29 and Kirstein said he was “a small and nervous man, who hated being a Jew.”30 Some considered Sachs a reverse snob and observed that he tended to favor students not as privileged as he was. This made for a naturally congenial relationship between Sachs and Perry Rathbone – who was neither privileged nor Jewish – that lasted well into Sachs’s retirement. “If he liked you, he would never desert you”31 was the impression he made on Rathbone, and this proved to be true, far beyond the course of his Harvard years. Sachs wrote letters of recommendation for Rathbone at the drop of a hat, letters that were the gold standard in the field. This opened many doors as he made his way west after Harvard in search of a professional life, landing his first job in the depths of the Depression at the Detroit Institute of Arts under its legendary director William Valentiner. When Rathbone eventually returned to Boston in 1955 to take over the MFA, Sachs was there to greet him and to counsel him.
By World War II Sachs had trained