The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

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.

      Perry T. Rathbone watches visitors’ reactions to medieval limestone sculpture of the Madonna and Child in sculpture hall, City Art Museum, Saint Louis, 1952.

      In their selection of Perry Rathbone for Boston, some trustees may have been impressed by his circus-act publicity stunts, which were certainly notable (it was said he had more in common with P. T. Barnum than his first two initials). Exuberant – irrepressible, even – he never failed to dream up some colorful surprise to draw the public’s attention to the latest museum event. But even more to the point, Ralph Lowell cited the number of special exhibitions he had organized that were indeed worthy of the fanfare. The era of ambitious loan shows was just beginning, and Rathbone was a clear leader in the movement, with the extraordinary success of his exhibitions from postwar Europe that, although the term had not yet been applied to the art museum, were blockbuster events. In January 1949 searchlights spanned the dark midwinter skies from the top of Saint Louis’s Museum Hill to announce the exhibition of Treasures from Berlin, a spectacular display of old master paintings that had been buried in the Merkers salt mine during the war. The crowds came in droves – some from hundreds of miles away – with lines of automobiles clogging the roads through Forest Park to the entrance of the Museum. To accommodate the unprecedented crowds in a limited schedule, Rathbone pressed the city to provide special bus service and kept the doors open twelve hours a day, from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. When the one hundred thousandth visitor passed through the entrance gate, the director was there to greet the astonished young woman with a gift. To this day no exhibition in the history of the Saint Louis Art Museum has topped the attendance record set by the Berlin show – an average of 12,634 people per day.

      

      Perry T. Rathbone escorts Eleanor Roosevelt into Treasures from Berlin, City Art Museum, Saint Louis, January, 1949.

      Just two years later Saint Louis would host another blockbuster. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna sent 279 works of art from their collection on a tour of American museums. Many of the works of art, including the famous Gobelin tapestries, were on a spectacular scale, and twenty-one galleries on the ground floor were cleared to accommodate them. Treasures from Vienna also included a number of pieces from the Hapsburgs’ world-class collection of arms and armor, and Rathbone’s publicity plan drew special attention to this feature, arranging for a knight on horseback to parade through the streets of downtown Saint Louis to advertise the show and later entertaining visitors when they arrived at the Museum. Again attendance hit record highs, altogether 289,546 over a six-week period, which, according to one report, was 90 percent higher than the crowds for the same show when it traveled to Chicago.

      In addition to this exotic fare, Rathbone conceived and created exhibitions of American art that spoke to the regional interests of the southern Midwest, such as the popular Mississippi Panorama and Westward the Way. Consistently, he also championed modern art and local collectors, most notably the newspaper heir Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., the department store mogul Morton May, and the symphony orchestra conductor Vladimir Golschmann, thereby encouraging many other Saint Louisans to join in the excitement of collecting art of their own time. Perhaps Rathbone’s greatest personal achievement was to mount the first retrospective of the art of Max Beckmann in America in 1948.

      Rathbone had landed in Saint Louis right at the cusp of an era of change, and he had succeeded in transforming the museum from a quiet repository of art into a vibrant center of culture, attracting people from every walk of life. With a broad mind and boundless energy, he seemed capable of anything. News got around the country that there was a man in Saint Louis who could, and did, make the difference. With his instinct for publicity and his eye for quality, he seemed a person who could lead Boston into the future. “He’d made quite a splash in Saint Louis,” recalled one MFA trustee. “He was clearly a man who had a high level of ambition. He also had a great success at breaking some of the original boundaries of what a museum might be. It was very exciting.”¹⁹

      For Rathbone’s part, it was a tortured decision to pull up stakes in Saint Louis, where his career had taken off, where he had formed enduring friendships, and where his happy family life had begun. But it was obvious that Boston’s offer meant an advancement to his career, and so with excitement and resolve he accepted their offer in 1954. Francis Henry Taylor, the then recently retired director of the Metropolitan Museum,²⁰ sent a telegram to the MFA’s board of trustees congratulating them “on securing the best man in the country.”²¹

      Ten years later, Taylor’s description was borne out – the MFA had rallied from its slumber, and from all appearances, Rathbone, its first professional museum director, was living up to the board’s highest expectations in every way. If some of the older guard had been wary of this young man from the Midwest, they could by now hardly deny his positive effect. He had instilled logic and clarity into the organization of the collections on view, and excitement into their display. To the MFA’s “stifling” and “airless” galleries Rathbone had brought a “fresh breeze,” said many a press review of the new director. He had “ventilated” the place with new energy and a new kind of economic prosperity, one that relied on the engagement of a broader public and the stimulation of a declining urban population. In his centennial history of the Museum, Walter Whitehill called Rathbone’s initiatives “The New Deal.” He cited Rathbone’s combination of “rare artistic perception and knowledge with the instincts of a showman,”²² the qualities that made this “New Deal” a reality.

      Under Rathbone the MFA immediately took on a distinctly festive spirit. While the director set forth to make the museum building and collections more attractive to visitors, the Ladies Committee, under Frannie Hallowell, fanned out all over Boston and environs to drum up new members, from Newburyport to the north, New Bedford to the south, and Framingham to the west. Long gone were the days when everyone who might have cared for the Museum lived in the Back Bay or Beacon Hill; like most American cities after the war, Boston had fled to its suburbs. Furthermore, ethnic pockets of Greek, Italian, Irish, Jewish, Polish, Armenian, and Chinese needed to be actively sought out and convinced that the MFA was not for Brahmins only. As the old saying goes, Boston was a city where “the Lowells speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God,” but it was time for those conversations to broaden and for those barriers to break down. The Ladies Committee went about the task of ensuring they would.

      Opening receptions at the Museum under Rathbone were among the most sought-after social events of the season and always well covered by the press. Hallowell and her band of ladies made every affair a memorable one, showing the same playful passion for surprise tactics for which the director had become famous. They decorated the grand staircase, designed the dinner menu, and created party favors according to the theme of each new exhibition. A fife and drum corps of men and boys led the guests into dinner for the opening of paintings by John Singleton Copley. For The Age of Rembrandt, the Ladies arranged Dutch