one’s fullest potential. There was no question that he was a figure we were supposed to live up to, and my mother reinforced this perception subtly but unwaveringly. We were his entourage and his cheering section. We walked in his glow, shaded and also sheltered by his fame. Like the family of any public figure, we were expected to understand and support his side, for we were a part of his identity. Wherever he went, he showed us how the individuals he encountered played an important role in his life, hailing the florist in Harvard Square, the chemist, and the gas station attendant like old friends.
It was exciting to be treated as insiders in his castle of work. I remember visiting him in his office, a huge high-ceilinged square where he operated behind a spacious desk, face-to-face with his latest object of desire on the opposite wall – Tiepolo’s terrifying Time Unveiling Truth; Monet’s delightful La Japonaise; the riveting, anonymous Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus; ter Borch’s soulful Horse and Rider. Occasionally, at the end of his day, I might be invited to trail after him on his rounds through the galleries, his brisk pace matching his omnivorous, critical eye. I practically ran to keep up, often losing track of how we got to where we were and in which end of the enormous building we found ourselves. Always he wanted to know what I thought and seemed to take my opinion to heart. And always he ventured to point out what was new in the way of an acquisition or fresh installation – his latest achievement. So I grew up with an uncommon sense that the art museum was in a continuous state of renewal and change. Things happened there for a reason, not by chance. Someone was at the helm, and that person made all the difference.
He was constantly guiding us on how to see a work of art and what made it wonderful. He preached a discriminating eye for quality but also openness to every kind of creative effort. At home as well as in the Museum, every object, every work of art or piece of furniture, had a background, its own story to tell; each was an emblem of our parents’ mythical past. The vulgarities of mass culture were held at bay. Comic books, junk food, chewing gum, and Coca-Cola were not allowed in the house, and television viewing was strictly limited. We were the upholders of high culture and hallowed tradition in a crass and commercial world, and we were clearly outnumbered.
Then there were the parties he and my mother hosted at our home on Coolidge Hill in Cambridge before the important evening events at the Museum. From the arrival of the help in starched uniforms (William Swinerton, a former butler from Ham House in England, and his wife made an incomparable team), to their invasion of the family kitchen, the bustle of dinner plates and glasses through the swinging pantry doors, to the animated banter, laughter, wafts of Guerlain, Chanel, and cigarette smoke mingling and rising to the upstairs landing, where we huddled, fascinated, to the gentle roar of guests bidding their good-byes in the front hall – that this was a glamorous and exciting world they inhabited we had no doubt.
Every July we welcomed my father home from Europe at Logan Airport, an event we looked forward to with great excitement. He would have a little something in his suitcase for each of us – a handmade souvenir from one of the countries he had visited – and we knew there were other surprises in store that he would keep in the bottom drawer of his dresser for later occasions. Over dinner we would beg him to tell us stories of his adventures abroad – the wonders of art he had seen, the interesting or odd people he had met, the mishaps and the chance encounters of his hectic travels. On our own occasional long summers abroad, between our mother’s carefully planned visits with friends and relatives all over the map, we joined him here and there for a bout of intense sightseeing, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, depending on our age, as he attempted to teach us patience in the presence of greatness.
Rathbone family group passport photo. Clockwise: Rettles Rathbone, Belinda, Eliza, Peter, 1954.
At Christmastime one of the great thrills of the season was to accompany him to Bonwit Teller, the most elegant women’s clothing store on Newbury Street. Straight to the second floor my sister and I would follow him to the designer dresses, where saleswomen in suits and lacquered hairdos circled around my father as if he were royalty, presenting him with the latest evening dresses as if they were one of a kind, inquiring would this one or that one most become Mrs. Rathbone? My father sized them up like works of art, engaging the ladies in animated conversation. He loved to shop as much as my mother hated it. She allowed him the pleasure of choosing, of enhancing her trim, athletic figure and her classic beauty, and, for the sake of his vanity perhaps more than her own, she always saved the biggest surprise under the Christmas tree for last.
As a member of the first generation of Harvard-trained museum professionals, my father was part of a postwar revision of the very concept of the American art museum. In his time, his achievements were clear to see and widely known. But by now they are nearly invisible, folded into the many layers of change since his heyday, forgotten amid their endless subsequent iterations and installations. Before setting out on the long path of his career, his mentor at Harvard, Paul Sachs, offered these cautionary words: a museum director’s life is written in sand.
In his retirement from professional life, which he accepted gracefully but reluctantly at seventy-five, my father continued to ply his folders and file cabinets with an unanswerable yearning to turn their contents into something meaningful and readable, to tell his story. But he was wary of the enterprise. He looked on, skeptically, as other museum directors of his time wrote their memoirs, which, while valuable, were also inevitably as self-serving as they were politically handcuffed. Of one thing he could be sure – that his life and times were carefully preserved in the archives of the museums he had served, as well as in the boxes and file cabinets and trunks at home full of personal letters, journals, press scrapbooks, and photo albums that he had kept faithfully throughout his life. In addition, two lengthy interviews were conducted after he retired from the MFA: one for the Archives of American Art in 1977, the other for the Columbia University Center for Oral History in 1981. It may have been too late for him to write his memoirs, but he left us – my brother, Peter; my sister, Eliza; and me – with a minutely documented trail. He had done his utmost to show us – and anyone else who might care – the way back to his true story, to make of it what we would for ourselves. As I stepped into the mass of evidence of his success, I was also freshly alerted to his many challenges. And as I began to investigate other individuals close to the scene, his point of view was countered by those of others. What emerged beyond my own impression of a benign and beloved leader was a figure in the constant heat of the spotlight, and one who was far more embattled and controversial than I had imagined.
Classical Galleries before renovation, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1960s.
How could it be otherwise? As a public servant, a museum director is fair game, inevitably the object of criticism for the museum’s shortcomings as much as the object of praise for its success. A new generation of museum directors continues to redefine the profession – to confront the latest demands of the public, improve on the physical plant, expand public programs, refine connoisseurship, conserve and build the collections, all the while and ever in search of a path to financial stability. Today’s museum directors face many of the same challenges as those of the past, but no matter what, as Paul Sachs warned his museum studies students at Harvard, their work will be written in sand. Other castles have been built where my father’s once stood, and other people have claimed responsibility for the innovations he stood for, as if for the first time, but in retrospect only in a new way, on a new scale, for a new age. In understanding the story that follows, it is essential to consider its many ramifications within the context of its times.
New Classical Galleries reinstallation, 1967.
Meanwhile, among the dwindling fellowship that remembers it at all, mystery, rumor, and misunderstanding still surround the story of the Boston Raphael, as well as a crust of inevitability that was only formed in hindsight. Our visit to the Uffizi was the first step backward into a matrix of circumstances that paved the way to this landmark series of events. If it was the story my father least wanted to be remembered for, it was also the