The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

later Jamie recalled the fine spring day in 1928 when the question of Perry’s academic future was more or less settled. By this time the Rathbones had moved from the city to New Rochelle, where Perry was enrolled in the public high school. It should be mentioned here that the family’s hopes had now been transferred to their younger son, after their firstborn, Westcott, had been expelled from every school in town for failing grades and misbehavior of one kind or another, winding up his high school years in a strict Catholic seminary. Weck, as he was known, had always been an antic, hyperactive child whose severe case of dyslexia, not yet widely known, went undiagnosed and whose penchant for entertaining his friends with clowning served only to aggravate his weak academic performance. Perry, conversely, had quietly worked hard at his studies and had shown signs of a higher ambition, a willingness and an ability to go the distance to reach his goals. Though somewhat shy compared with Weck, slight in build, and less talented at sports, Perry now towered over his older brother in height and in stature. For years Weck had hogged the limelight, but once in his teens it was Perry’s turn to shine.

      Sharing a picnic with the Rathbones on the rocks of Long Island Sound one spring day, Uncle Jamie (as he himself recalled) was wearing his brand-new bowler hat from Bond Street, which he felt sure “heightened [his] avuncular mien.” The question of Perry’s future came up for discussion. While his performance in mathematics and science left something to be desired, he showed a keen interest in literature and a talent for acting and public speaking as well. Most of all Perry showed a talent for art, consistently contributing his pen and ink drawings to various student high school publications. But there were considerable doubts in both Perry’s and his parents’ minds that his artistic talent was “firm enough to build upon a career as an artist.” His uncle set out to strategize. He should study fine arts. At Harvard. Where else? And then seek a post in a museum. “On that path,” Jamie argued, “he could move for life in the well-remunerated circles of art, enjoying all the atmosphere and congeniality of it without being required to produce it.”⁴ Jamie felt quite sure that he had made an impression on the whole family. In hindsight, it seems that he had.

      While in academic terms Perry’s high school record was unspectacular (he graduated 178th in his class of 235), his sixteen-year-old heart was thus set on Harvard. “I wish to go to Harvard,” he wrote in his application, “because, from what I have seen and learned of the college . . . I know that the Fine Arts course is exceptionally good.”⁵

      Perry, Beatrice, and Westcott Rathbone, c. 1929.

      The Rathbones would be stretched to meet the costs of a Harvard education – in 1929 tuition was $400, and residence costs added another $350. Westcott had already laid claim to $800 of the family’s resources for studying music (an interest that did not last), while their parents’ combined income was a modest $7,000 a year. Perry applied for financial aid with letters of support from his high school teachers. Perry was “a manly, well-bred, and splendid fellow,” said one, “who has a real capacity for exerting the right kind of influence among his fellows.” Perry came from a family of “old reliable New England stock – the kind who do the right thing.”⁶ His English teacher added that he was a boy of the highest moral qualities. “I notice it in particular in English class in our discussions in which he always supports the right side,” she wrote, and she made the point that this took courage in the face of “possible ridicule from the other boys.”⁷ Despite financial needs and fine moral character, Perry’s application for financial aid was denied, but the show of support for his case might have also been exactly the degree of extra weight his application needed to succeed. In July the letter arrived. Perry was accepted into the Harvard class of 1933. Somehow his parents pulled together the necessary funds, and he entered his freshman year in September 1929.

      Once he was admitted, his father offered a candid appraisal of Perry’s strengths as well as frankly admitting his shortcomings. “[Perry] is a splendid worker in channels he is interested in,” he wrote, “but a very rank procrastinator in the things that do not interest him.” What interested him was art; he exhibited a gift for drawing and “a great craving for knowledge of both the old and new artistic worlds.”⁸

      It was only a matter of weeks after Perry arrived in Cambridge before the stock market crashed in October 1929. But Harvard was a safe haven during those early years of what was to become the Great Depression, a highly civilized way of life and a sanctuary of learning far removed from the concerns of making a living. President Lowell, in charge since 1909, had recently completed his most far-reaching accomplishment: the house plan. New housing had been badly needed to accommodate the growing student population, which had doubled in the late nineteenth century, and Lowell had seized the chance to design an inner structure for the much larger college into which Harvard had suddenly evolved. The idea was to create smaller communities in the form of newly built residential houses, each with its own cultural, social, and athletic activities. In a fresh democratic spirit, an effort was made to diversify members of the student body in terms of their social and economic backgrounds. The house plan greatly improved the quality of life among the undergraduates, particularly for those, like Perry Rathbone, who were not rich enough to rent their own private digs along the so-called Gold Coast of Mount Auburn Street and who formerly would have been relegated to rented rooms in working-class neighborhoods far from the center of the campus.

      Dunster House, the farthest east of the newly completed neo-Georgian houses along the Charles River, would be Perry’s home and community for his final two years at Harvard. With his roommate Collis “Cog” Hardenbergh, an aspiring architect from Minneapolis, Perry enjoyed a comfortable suite with a fireplace and three windows overlooking the river, altogether a pleasant retreat for study and a decent place to entertain their girlfriends (in those days of Prohibition, this usually meant bathtub gin) before a football game. Together Cog and Perry bought a brand-new sofa; mother made curtains, and a few other pieces came from home, including a blue-and-white tea set. Perry began his art collection with a Japanese print, for which he paid six dollars.

      Meals were served in the Dunster House dining hall, where students ordered from a menu and were waited on by maids in black-and-white uniforms. No Harvard man in those days would have thought of going to a meal without a coat and tie. Nor would he have gone anywhere in public without a hat. At last Perry found himself in the kind of company he had been yearning to keep for many years. “Ever since a young child,” his father wrote, “[Perry] has gradually developed a discriminating taste as to the selection of his companions.” He admitted that his younger son’s discriminating taste was “at times almost too much so, for among certain classes he is not considered a good mixer.”⁹ Now among his Harvard classmates, Perry was in his element. And while during his high school years he had shown little interest in the opposite sex, the young women of Wellesley and Radcliffe Colleges were a breed apart from the small-town girls of New Rochelle.

      Perry was right in anticipating that the fine arts courses at Harvard were exceptionally good, and they were only getting better. The new Fogg Museum had recently been completed on Quincy Street in 1927, and “it still had this delicious odor of fresh wax on its floors,” Perry recalled years later. Genuine objects of antiquity were replacing the reproductions of classical statuary that had filled the old Fogg, and a gift of seventeenth-century Jacobean furnishings established the Naumberg period room on the second floor. Picture collections, including Italian art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and a group of nineteenth-century European paintings given by Annie Swan Coburn, were also growing. Forbes’s efforts to make the building itself of the highest quality were not lost on young Rathbone, who recalled years later his first impressions of the new Fogg building: “You could see that it was beautifully designed, beautifully built, and with a great care for the materials.”¹⁰

      In his freshman year Perry took a survey course taught by Chandler Post, which provided the art historical framework he would rely on for the rest of his life. “[Post] was a model art historian,” Perry recalled, “with a marvelously organized mind.”¹¹ Post memorized his lectures and delivered them with splendid clarity. His course was well complemented by another kind of survey taught by Arthur Pope, who provided a more experimental approach