Kent had decided that Harvard, with its first-class art faculty, libraries, and a burgeoning teaching museum, was the natural place to lead the way.
In the formation of his course, Sachs endeavored to train the scholar-connoisseur, adding to this essential quality hands-on instruction on a museum’s day-to-day management. The course began experimentally and informally in 1921 with a few students and proved an instant success. Early graduates of the course included Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art; James Rorimer, director of the Metropolitan Museum; John Walker, director of the National Gallery in Washington; and John Coolidge, director of the Fogg Museum. For nearly thirty years Sachs single-handedly trained a generation of museum professionals, including Perry Rathbone, who entered in the largest class to date in 1933.
By the time the museum course had begun, Edward Waldo Forbes had paved the way. Forbes was from an old Boston family, the grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson on his mother’s side, while his paternal grandfather was the China trade capitalist John Murray Forbes. Spending his summers on the island of Naushon in Buzzards Bay, Edward developed an enduring respect for nature and a lifelong hobby of painting en plein air. As the first director of the new Fogg Museum,2 Forbes placed an unprecedented value on connoisseurship and conservation. He emphasized the importance of the students’ firsthand acquaintance with authentic works of art, a privilege he himself had not enjoyed as a Harvard undergraduate, when art history classes relied primarily on black-and-white reproductions.
At Harvard, Forbes had studied under Charles Eliot Norton, the first professor of art history at the college, who emphasized the relationship between fine arts and literature. Norton’s course, like that of his close friend John Ruskin at Oxford, was largely theoretical, as much about society, literature, and ethics as about visual art. But being a child of the industrial age, Forbes, like many of his contemporaries, was also drawn to the “aura of the original.” After graduating from Harvard, he traveled in Europe, absorbing as much as he could of the real thing. In Rome he struck up a friendship with Norton’s son Richard, who was teaching at the American Academy. Norton persuaded Forbes to assemble a collection of Renaissance paintings to put on loan to the Fogg for display. With this advice, his lifelong relationship with the Fogg began.
Forbes thus set an example, which led to gifts of important works of art to the Fogg’s collection from other wealthy Harvard alumni, welcome additions to the fledgling collection of plaster casts and a small group of traditional paintings gathered by the Museum’s original donors, Mr. and Mrs. William Hayes Fogg. New gifts from Forbes and others were so numerous by 1912 that plans were made for a new museum adjacent to Harvard Yard on Quincy Street. As director, Forbes conceived of the new Fogg as a laboratory of learning, accommodating galleries, lecture halls, curatorial offices, conservation, and a research library all under the same roof. He closely oversaw the architectural plans by Charles Coolidge – from the outside, a simple brick neocolonial; inside, a spacious, skylit courtyard modeled, down to the last detail, on a High Renaissance facade in Montepulciano, in Tuscany, creating a sanctuary from the day-to-day bustle of Cambridge. Forbes insisted that this be finished, like the original, in travertine, at the then-extraordinary cost of $56,085. Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell balked. A simple plaster finish would cost about $8,500. The travertine was not only expensive, Lowell asserted, it was ostentatious. But Forbes was adamant. How can you educate young people in the language of materials, he asked, if they are exposed only to cheap imitations? The debate dragged on for several months while Forbes sought financial support from other benefactors and eventually, with typical single-mindedness and patience, won his case.
Someone once described Forbes as a man of few ideas, all of them excellent. Among these was the idea to recruit Paul Sachs, Harvard class of 1900, to teach and to be codirector of the Fogg. Sachs was a New Yorker and a partner in the family investment-banking firm of Goldman Sachs. He came from a long line of German-Jewish patrons of the arts and was himself a passionate collector of prints and drawings. Having plied the family trade for a few years, he was more than willing to leave the financial world behind and join the fine arts faculty at Harvard. Forbes perceived how Sachs – already a generous benefactor of the Museum – could complement his own interests and inclinations, bringing his business know-how, as well as his extensive contacts among rich art collectors from New York and beyond. Their partnership began with Sachs’s appointment to the visiting committee in 1911. “My foot is in the door,”3 Sachs excitedly told his wife, Meta. The door opened in 1915, when Sachs was made associate director of the Fogg. This unlikely duo – one a patrician Boston Brahmin, the other from the Jewish-German financial world of New York – formed the vision and foundation for Harvard’s art department in the twentieth century, a combination with far-reaching consequences.
How did it come to pass that Perry Rathbone would fall into this exclusive lap of learning, and where had the seeds of his interest in art been sown? It was his father, Howard Rathbone, who first inspired his artistic inclinations. From infancy to age six, Perry grew up in New York City, where his father worked as a salesman for a wallpaper firm and then as a furrier, and his mother, Beatrice, was a public school nurse. Among Perry’s formative memories were family visits to the Metropolitan Museum. One unforgettable day in the American period rooms, his father told Perry and his only brother, Westcott, that the antique desk on display was certain to contain a secret drawer. To prove his point, he slipped under the guard rope, gestured to the boys to follow him, and unlatched the desktop wherein, like a magic trick, the secret drawer was revealed.
Why was this little vignette, which Rathbone fondly related to an interviewer decades later in 1982, so significant? On the surface, it tells of his first visits to an art museum, but more than that, it shows a combination of paternal traits he would cherish and inherit: a curiosity and keen interest in the arts, the audacity to break rules to get closer to a sacred object to better understand it, and the personal charm to talk his way out of trouble when necessary.
Though he did not have the benefit of a higher education, Howard Rathbone had an eye. An avid photographer, he was alive to his physical environment in its every form – from antique furniture to the scenic beauty of the countryside to the distinction of a pedigreed dog. A spry little man, he knew how to strike a pose and what to wear for every occasion. He understood the quality of materials, the subtleties of color, and the value of the little details – how to stuff the handkerchief in his breast pocket just so and how to keep the carnation fresh in his buttonhole. He was also a charmer par excellence, not just with the ladies but also with children, the elderly, or anyone who appeared to be in need of a little boost. In contrast to his practical, steadfast, long-suffering wife, Beatrice, Howard had a gift for making everyone in his orbit feel like the most important person in the world.
Howard Betts Rathbone, self-portrait, undated.
If his father inspired Perry’s artistic eye, natural charm, and sartorial savoir faire, it was his Uncle Jamie who drew out his more intellectual side, and it is he who should be credited for planting the idea of Harvard so firmly in Perry’s mind. His mother’s younger brother by ten years, James Willard Connely was a dashing figure in Perry’s childhood. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he worked for some time as a journalist in New York for McClure’s Magazine and Harper’s Weekly. A handsome young man with a mop of dark brown hair, Jamie was worldly, articulate, and intimate with writers and artists, which meant that he frequented the colorful bohemian circles of Greenwich Village. As a bachelor living in a rented room, he was also happy to accept the occasional home-cooked meal (even under the critical eye of his sister, Beatrice) and to entertain his rowdy, redheaded nephews. At the