The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

not fully defined. It was soon evident to Griswold that “they didn’t know what to do with me.” Not only were the boundaries of his position unclear, but the chain of command was too – he didn’t know whether he was working for the director, as he had been led to believe, or the president of the board. As Griswold recalled, Seybolt had “a totally different concept of what a trustee’s job was. He wanted to be the boss and he ran it with a horse-whip.”²³

      Seybolt had a vision and a plan, and he took on the presidency in a strikingly proactive spirit. It appeared that for him the MFA was becoming a nearly full-time occupation. He suggested to Rathbone that he needed “a place to hang his hat,”²⁴ then requested his own telephone, and soon he wanted a desk to put it on. It would not be long before he commanded his own office suite, which meant the regrettable closing of the primitive art gallery²⁵ in the ongoing encroachment of offices on gallery space, and two private secretaries.

      Seybolt also perceived problems in the structure of the board going forward. “To make big changes in the system wasn’t possible,” he said, “unless you brought in new votes, so to speak.” Even with the addition of new, younger members, there was still a majority of old-timers, “who tended to be drenched and instilled and distilled with their ancestors,”²⁶ as Seybolt described them. Furthermore, the structure of the board as originally laid out in the bylaws was top-heavy with ex officio members, including not only the token representatives of the city government, such as the mayor and the superintendent of schools, but also three each from the Museum’s founding institutions: Harvard, MIT, and the Boston Athenæum. “The cradle of the Museum of Fine Arts was so surrounded by fairy godmothers,” wrote Nathaniel Burt of its early years, “that it almost suffocated.”²⁷ Rathbone, who as director was also automatically a trustee with a voice and a vote,²⁸ agreed with Seybolt. For while this arrangement represented a balance between professional input and financial support, it also meant that the ex officio members had other priorities. Said Rathbone, there was “a need for new blood and people who were devoted to the Museum first, last, and most importantly, and not to others.”²⁹ In due course Rathbone and Seybolt persuaded the rest of the trustees to agree to change the bylaws to cut back on the ex officio members from nine to three – one from each of the founding institutions – and thus expand the limit of elective trustees by six.

      As president, Seybolt did not confine himself to his office or boardroom. Like the director, he began to make a habit of touring the Museum, encountering staff members from every department, and taking a seat beside them in the staff dining room. “He was nosy and pokey, and very pompous,” recalled the Museum’s graphic designer Carl Zahn, who had contributed significantly to the fresh image of the Museum under Rathbone. “He would always buttonhole me as if he was my boss.”³⁰ Others were bold enough to remind Seybolt that they answered not to him but to Rathbone. He seemed to be looking for holes in the system and signs of inefficiency at every turn. “You felt somehow disapproval in his every glance,”³¹ recalled Rathbone’s secretary Virginia Fay. To the staff, Seybolt was a stern and overbearing figure. Furthermore, he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that, as he put it, “the actual management of the museum and really all of its force came from the director.”³²

      Soon he began to create a deluge of memoranda that landed on Rathbone’s desk at an alarming rate – with questions, calculations, and propositions that demanded an immediate response – and he popped up on the trail of the director’s movements throughout his busy day. “I’m here because you’re here,” he would say, wrapping one arm around him, and, “You’re a great guy,”³³ giving him a punch in the shoulder. Eleanor Sayre, curator of prints and drawings, recoiled at Seybolt’s gestures of intimacy and regarded them skeptically as a power tactic. “Seybolt grabbed me in his arms and kissed me, wanting to show his power over me,” she recalled. Sayre could see that the new president intended to run the Museum himself, even though “he knew absolutely nothing about art or museums.”³⁴ As Seybolt made his personal study of the Museum’s management, he was fascinated by Rathbone’s involvement with every single detail, and by the continuous parade of staff members in and out of the director’s office. “Mr. Rathbone was the boss,” said Seybolt. “Practically all decisions, by his admittance, even to the placing of the guards in the museum, had been observed or directed by him.”³⁵

      

      Tamsin McVickar, administrative assistant to the director, 1960s.

      Virginia Fay, administrative assistant to the director, 1960s.

      Rathbone needed plenty of air, and Seybolt didn’t seem willing to give him, or anyone else on the staff, the space to breathe. While the trustees were the custodians of the Museum, they were not responsible for, nor greatly aware of, its day-to-day operations, and this, to Rathbone’s mind, was as it should be. His most sensitive task was in the direction of his curatorial staff, and this he did with a keen instinct for the curatorial mind and a singular talent for inspiring its heart. “He was in and out of every curatorial department at least once a week,” remembered Laura Luckey, an assistant curator in the paintings department, “lifting everyone to a different level. Nobody slouched around; we all worked hard.”³⁶ While he kept in close touch with his staff, he also gave them “a great deal of latitude,” and in responding to their problems or questions, “he was very approachable,”³⁷ remembered assistant curator Lucretia Giese.