It was also a place where the staff loved their work, where they felt appreciated at the top, no matter what their position in the hierarchy, for the director conveyed a sincere interest in each one of them personally. “Just the way he said hello in the morning made me feel good for the rest of the day,” remembered long-time staff member Carol Farmer of Rathbone’s leadership. On the job, Rathbone was never one to hole up in his office; he was all over the Museum, moving through the galleries and offices at a brisk clip, addressing every staff member he encountered by his or her first name. This was not only a friendly spirit but also one that constantly showed his passionate interest in the high standard of every link in the complex chain of the Museum’s management. Every December a bibulous Christmas party was held for the entire staff, which by the mid-1960s had grown to four hundred. While many Boston-area institutions and businesses had begun to phase out the Christmas party as an unnecessary extravagance, the MFA staff fondly adhered to its traditional festivities, where the spiked punch flowed freely, musicians inspired all manner of dancing, and scholarly curators broke into song. On a more regular basis Elizabeth “Betty” Riegel, the head of the sales desk, held an informal sherry hour in the gift shop every Friday afternoon at five o’clock as her way of marking the end-of-week balancing of the books. Rathbone often dropped in for Riegel’s sherry hour, and many other staff members were regulars as well. These were the gestures that buoyed morale in immeasurable ways and reinforced the feeling that every constituent was a member of the team.
Virginia Fay, Santa Claus, Sylvia Purrins, and Perry T. Rathbone in Greek line dance, Christmas party, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1960s.
But by the mid-1960s there was a seismic change rumbling beneath the surface. The pressure rose like the mercury in a thermometer – the demands of the centennial compounded by the need for new kinds and sources of money. The Museum’s operations had reached a tipping point in their size and scale. While Rathbone instinctively understood how to raise revenue by enlarging the membership and increasing the programs of the Museum, he had never considered direct fund-raising a part of his job. This was not what he had been trained to do. Furthermore, it was no part of the thinking of the genteel board of trustees. As the gentlemen they were, they prided themselves on the occasional burst of generosity for the sake of a special project or acquisition or the covering of a small debt. But the idea of making a major donation to a general fund drive was outside their habit of mind or range of vision.
At the start of the centennial drive Rathbone started looking around for a professional fund-raiser, at the time a fairly new concept. After interviewing a few candidates, he hired a firm by the name of Ketchum, a name, he mused, that suited a fund-raiser. But Rathbone quickly saw that the Ketchum firm, or anyone else outside the museum family, would not be an answer to all the challenges. A professional fund-raiser can lay out a timetable and keep track of progress. Essentially, he surmised, “you pay someone to force you to do the job you have to do.”24
What Rathbone also needed was leadership from inside the museum family – namely, a trustee to chair the campaign. His notion of the perfect fit was John “Jack” Gardner, whose family had served cultural institutions in Boston for generations, whose great-aunt Isabella Stewart Gardner, a native New Yorker, stunned Boston society with her extraordinary collection of European art and the creation of Fenway Court. Young Jack had followed his father George Peabody “Peabo” Gardner onto the board, representing the fourth generation in his family serving as stewards of the great Museum. Jack Gardner was “the right kind of proper Bostonian,”25 Rathbone believed, to assume the role of figurehead for the campaign. Furthermore, he had recently been elected treasurer to the trustees in 1960, replacing one of Rathbone’s closest confidantes, Robert Baldwin, a broker at State Street Bank, who had served for many years “untangling administrative knots and making himself useful to everyone.”26 But Rathbone had no success persuading Gardner, or any other member of the board, to take on this important role, for the Museum had never had to reach outside its own little family for anything before, and it seemed impossible to change the habits of even the younger members of the old guard. The last thing any of them wanted to do was to go around the town with a tin cup.
Besides, these same board members were all busy supporting a full range of other beloved nonprofits. Boston had more than its share, and each commanded a loyal following. There was Harvard and MIT, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the brand-new Museum of Science, headed by the aggressive Bradford Washburn. There were hospitals and schools. “Owing to the great number of nonprofit institutions,” lamented Rathbone, “the competition is keener [in Boston] per capita than anywhere else in the country.”27 While competition outside the walls of the MFA was rife, the spirit inside was tepid. Not since its inception had there been any kind of fund-raising effort, and among the general population, as well as the inner circles, “there was no habit of giving to the MFA.”28
The Changing Face of the Board
IN THE 1960S Rathbone actively sought to change the complexion of the Museum’s aging board of trustees, to bring in younger members “whose minds were open, and who already had different ideas of what a museum might be.”1 Among the young trustees of an old Boston tribe was Lewis Cabot, who joined the board in 1966. A keen collector of modern art as well as a recent graduate of Harvard Business School, Cabot, who was a youthful twenty-eight at the time of his election to the board, later somewhat facetiously commented that his election was part of an effort “to bring the average age down from senility.”2 In seeking out younger individuals of wealth with a passion for art, Rathbone knew better than to confine himself to old Boston society. He introduced Landon Clay, a collector of pre-Columbian art from Savannah; John Goelet, a collector of Asian and Islamic art from New York; and Jeptha Wade, whose grandfather was a well-known collector in Cleveland. Also noteworthy were the growing number of women on the board, with Helen Bernat, a collector of Asiatic art and also one of the first Jewish members, joining in 1966, and contemporary art collector Susan Morse Hilles in 1968, not to mention the steady representation of the Ladies Committee by its standing chairwoman. Thus new blood began to trickle in – an emerging generation of trustees with a different kind of attitude.
Rathbone also managed to persuade the trustees to make a landmark decision he had been promoting for some time. This was to open up their efforts to raise money to the business sector and to institute corporate memberships. “No individuals such as those who built this place are going to pull us out of the fiscal problem we have,”3 Rathbone told an interviewer in 1967. A promising alternative, which was gaining some credibility at that time, was for the corporate wealth of the country to “step into the breach.”4,5 While before it was considered inappropriate for a cultural institution to accept money from a business (and plenty of corporate executives felt the same way), the time had come to actively engage Boston’s business community, to reach out to “more entrepreneurial people who had larger sums of money to play with,” said Lewis Cabot, “and who were – dare I say it – anxious to make a social position of their lives.”6 Rathbone would be the first to admit that pure devotion to art was not the only motive of the corporate sponsor, that to have one’s name attached to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was “a passport to higher things or better circles. It’s quite a feather in one’s cap.”7 While this remained an embarrassment to some members of the board, the resolution passed.
Rettles and Perry Rathbone, Charlotte and Ralph Lowell, receiving line, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1960s.
Among the first corporate members to respond to this initiative was the local canned-food enterprise, the William Underwood Company, with a gift