The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

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      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 earlier and had returned with a very positive impression of the art museum – a grand neoclassical edifice designed by Cass Gilbert for the 1904 World’s Fair as a Hall of Fine Arts, situated at the highest point in the city’s sprawling Forest Park. Coolidge, then director of Harvard’s Fogg Museum, found the Saint Louis museum “full of stimulating surprises, no duds with big names . . . but always fresh, unpretentious, and truly wonderful.” He credited the director with its extraordinary growth and winning style. “Rathbone’s showmanship is exemplified by his placing of sculpture and tapestries. He has adapted an intractable building, a monument, to diverse uses, and he has expressed the highest connoisseurship and taste.”¹⁸ The trustees of the MFA were at the time beginning to wonder when their aging director Edgell, now in his seventies, would retire and could hardly wait to move forward with the search for his replacement. Several other candidates were considered, including Rathbone’s Harvard classmates Charles Cunningham, who would soon take on the Wadsworth Athenæum, in Hartford, and James Plaut, director of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Also under serious consideration was Richard McLanathan, already curator of decorative arts at the MFA. But while all were equally Harvard men (imperative) and graduates of Sachs’s museum course (desirable), Rathbone had the edge.