The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

was over, he would come to understand the full weight of those words.

      For the first time in its history, the Boston Museum embarked on a capital campaign drive. Looking forward to its second century, securing the funding was a foremost priority in achieving its goals. In the 1960s inflation was changing the economic outlook in ways that no one could have predicted, and in ways that made everything going forward unpredictable. The museum’s endowment went down, while the pressures on its financial resources went up. The cost of mounting exhibitions was suddenly many times what it had been just a few years before, with insurance, travel, and construction costs rising exponentially. At the same time it also began to be clear that professional curators could no longer afford to live on the modest “gentlemen’s” salaries that used to be par for the course. There was the high cost of living, and there was the high cost of running a museum. Until recently the Museum’s endowment had paid for 90 percent of its operating expenses. Just as the public’s expectations climbed, inflation outpaced the endowment revenue. Just as the American public was becoming accustomed to the idea of improvements in every sector of public life as an inalienable right, the postwar economy began sputtering for the first time.

      

      Architectural rendering, George Robert White Wing, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1969.

      The biggest challenge was the need for space; with its increased staff and operations developed under Rathbone’s direction, the Museum had outgrown its building. A whole new wing was conceived to expand and improve its activities. At a projected 45,000 square feet, this new wing would increase exhibition space and relocate the administrative offices, library, restaurant, and education department. Physically it would join the two extensions at the west end of the building to form an outdoor courtyard for the display of modern sculpture.⁷ Phase one of the program was to add additional space to the decorative arts wing at the East end to house the Forsyth Wickes collection in meticulously reproduced interiors of the benefactor’s home in Newport, as specified by his will.⁸

      Beginning with the urgent need to publicize the campaign, Rathbone moved the versatile and affable Diggory Venn over from the education department to direct the production of fund-raising materials and generally field all publicity efforts. The Challenge of Greatness, a lavishly illustrated booklet, detailed the Museum’s needs, breaking them down into their various categories: bricks and mortar, staff salaries, operations, and last but not least, acquisitions. After a long trustees’ meeting in October 1965 to discuss fund-raising tactics ahead, Rathbone recorded in his journal the reluctance he faced in introducing the bold facts of raising money to the Yankee old guard. Clearly, they had come to take their museum’s financial health for granted, to believe that they were well set up for the future, thanks to the generous and farsighted founders of the pre-graduated income tax days. As Rathbone discovered to his dismay, “There was a conspicuous dislike of the direct appraisal of what our trustees must give.”⁹

      A few days later Rathbone’s mood was more optimistic, following the first “cultivation” meeting for the Centennial Development Fund Drive in the ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel in Copley Square. Helen Bernat, a new trustee with fresh energy, had arranged a luncheon party for a group of prospective donors and guests of honor, including Senator Edward Kennedy, Boston mayor John Collins, and William Paley, chairman of CBS. “A bit of a strain for all concerned,” recorded Rathbone, “but anxiety melted with the success of the proceedings. Mrs. B. spoke beautifully and president Ralph Lowell was at his best. Then a slide presentation with a tape recording followed by my speech which went over very well. We are encouraged. For the first time outside the Museum family I pronounced our need – $20,000,000.”^{10, 11} In 1965, when a first-class postage stamp cost five cents, the Eastern shuttle between New York and Boston was fifteen dollars, and an average family income was less than $6,000 a year, this was a breathtaking figure indeed.

      When Rathbone took the helm in 1955, the MFA was widely known as the Old Lady of Huntington Avenue – respected, staid, rich, but old-fashioned. The trustees knew full well that the Old Lady had fallen behind the times, and she required a major fix. Arriving straight from his conspicuous success as director of the City Art Museum of Saint Louis,¹² Rathbone appeared to be the kind of man the Museum was looking for to charge the place with new energy and fresh ideas.

      Since 1935 George Harold Edgell, who was also one of Rathbone’s professors at Harvard, had been director, but his instincts for running the Museum remained stalled in a Depression-era attitude. “Charming and cavalier,”¹³ as Rathbone described him, Edgell arrived at the MFA every day with a pet spaniel that slept under his desk and checked out early on Fridays to head for his shooting estate in New Hampshire. About once a week he made the rounds of the curatorial departments to inquire if there were any letters that needed writing. Otherwise it seemed to him there was little left for him to do and no conceivable way for him to improve on the peaceful status quo. Legend had it that museum attendance was so low that Edgell and William Dooley, head of education, used to stand at the Huntington Avenue entrance and wave their arms in front of the sensor to raise the figures. Special events, such as the afternoon tea parties that quietly honored the installation of a corridor of drawings, were attended by a loyal and mostly elderly few. MFA trustee Richard Paine, an innovative investment advisor, told Rathbone in all candor that he hoped under his directorship there would be no more of those parties that no one turned up for except “some old ladies in funny hats.”¹⁴

      The job Rathbone was taking was on an entirely different scale from the one he had left behind. The Boston Museum was considerably older than the City Art Museum of Saint Louis, and its collections far more extensive. While the Saint Louis museum had just one curator to cover all departments,¹⁵ every department at the MFA was led by an aging curator, each one internationally revered and firmly entrenched, each in charge of his or her own little hill town. Furthermore, in contrast to the Saint Louis museum, whose operating costs were entirely supported by city funds, Boston had the only major museum in the country entirely dependent on private donations – not a single tax dollar headed its way. In the mid-1950s there was no admission charge, and Rathbone was appalled to learn that the Museum had only fifteen hundred members, nearly half of whom paid less than five dollars a year for the privilege. Meanwhile, the staff of the Museum operated a little like a men’s club, in which its curators, as well as its patrons, carried on their work with virtually no accountability to their public. The collections were priceless, but the Museum was nearly bankrupt, and the galleries were dim and lifeless. It was, as Rathbone described it, “a slumbering giant.”¹⁶

      Boston’s challenges were clearly visible in the mid-1950s, but there was at least one factor making the job more attractive to Rathbone than Saint Louis had been at first.¹⁷ The Museum had a congenial and gentlemanly president of the board, the white-whiskered Ralph Lowell. Lowell was the quintessential Boston Brahmin. “Mr. Boston,” as he came to be known, sat on many boards in the city, where he performed the duties of the civic-minded philanthropist. Lowell was the opposite of a social climber, sitting with his wife, Charlotte, at the top of the social ladder and, in typical Boston style, dressing the part down. Personally he seemed to see no reason to change his habits as progress crept up around him – he never learned to drive, and he never flew in a plane. He summered in Nahant, a quiet spit of oceanfront a few miles north of Boston, and not once in his life had he set foot in Newport, that ostentatious getaway of rich New Yorkers. But while firmly habit-bound, Lowell was not so conservative when it came to the evolving needs of the cultural institutions he served in Boston. Practical and to the point, he instinctively understood the pressing goals and needs of the MFA at midcentury. By the time Rathbone came to the helm, Lowell, like other members of the MFA board, was ready for change. For his part, Rathbone understood that enlisting and maintaining the support of the old guard was implicit in his appointment as museum director. He would have to go about his job with a sense of respect for tradition while remaining alert to the challenge of delivering the changes everyone understood were necessary for the MFA.

      Indeed, the careful investigation of Rathbone’s suitability had been going on for months, if not years. MFA trustee John Coolidge had visited Saint Louis two years