The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

Deviled Ham and had accelerated into takeover mode, expanding its base that year with the acquisition of Burnham & Morrill of Portland, Maine, best known for its B&M baked beans (and incidentally a traditional, if somewhat disparaged, staple of the Boston diet). Underwood’s CEO, a tall, imposing man named George Seybolt, was acquainted with MFA trustee William Appleton Coolidge, who had solicited his help in raising money for the Episcopal diocese. Coolidge made the introductions while Seybolt did the heavy lifting, and they managed to reach their goal of $5 million. Bill Coolidge (not to be confused with his distant cousin, John Coolidge, of the Fogg), a one time senior partner with the Boston law firm Ropes & Gray and a venture capitalist, was generally considered the richest man on the board, and in his quiet, patrician way, he was a force. “When Bill Coolidge had something to say,” recalled trustee Jack Gardner, “everybody listened.”⁸ At the start of the centennial fund drive in 1965, Bill Coolidge recommended Seybolt as the kind of business mind they needed to enlist and consult. An aggressive fund-raiser with a high profile in the Chamber of Commerce and a lively interest in American antiques, Seybolt, as Rathbone later summarized, “seemed to be the man.”⁹

      Even though Seybolt was an altogether different kind of person from any other member of the genteel museum community – a high school graduate of the Valley Forge Military Academy among the overwhelmingly Harvard-educated board – once he began offering his services pro bono, it was but a short step to his becoming a trustee. Rathbone vividly recalled the meeting to which Seybolt was invited as a special guest to offer his advice on fund-raising tactics ahead. Seybolt looked around the table, meeting the eyes of everyone assembled, and said meaningfully, “This is a job for a trustee, isn’t it?”¹⁰ And in short order, he was elected in February 1966.

      At first Rathbone was relieved to have Seybolt on the board to help him focus the trustees’ attention on the Museum’s financial needs and shoulder the burden of fund-raising. If more established members of the board were unwilling to lead the charge, what could he do? If Seybolt wasn’t exactly the image of old Boston, he was the image, perhaps, of the new Boston. Rathbone had understood from the moment he arrived there that the mold had to be broken, and here it was breaking in a new way. Seybolt was ready and willing. More than that, he was aggressive, he was ambitious, and it was clear that he had his eye on the bottom line, and that was what mattered now.

      Seybolt immediately perceived flaws in the system. For one thing, the board meetings were too short, and too few – President Ralph Lowell saw no reasonable call for more than three or four meetings a year and took pride in the fact that they usually concluded within two hours. For another, the board did not seem to be presented with any real problems to solve. Lowell would review the director’s report about an hour before the meeting, and then they would all sit down around the table to listen and discuss it. “Everything at that point was very polite, deferential,” remembered Cabot, “a steward without being a visionary was the way the trustee saw his role.”¹¹ These were the quiet, responsible guardians of a public trust, stewards of a great ship, but they were not her captain. When faced with a proposal of any kind, Ralph Lowell “just smiled and signed, smiled and signed.”¹²

      “What they got was canned food,” Seybolt complained with an interesting choice of metaphor, “all prepared, even chewed and regurgitated – they got this pat stuff.” As he observed the proceedings at one meeting after another, Seybolt quickly concluded that he himself was “the only one there that was really living in the world as it was.”¹³

      Around the Museum, staff and trustees alike noticed that Seybolt’s ideas were strikingly corporate, his manners were alternately intimidating and overfamiliar, and it was clear he had an agenda. Some perceived his ambition was not just for the MFA but also for himself – to gain access to the top tier of Boston society. Lewis Cabot regarded him as “a very complicated man, driven by social prestige, wanting to be acknowledged as one of the substantial people in what was then called ‘the Vault’¹⁴ downtown.”¹⁵ It was rumored that Seybolt’s election to the board was contingent on his membership to the exclusive Somerset Club on Beacon Hill. With his wife, Hortense, he began to appear at high-profile museum events, where the columnists from the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald would spotlight the up-and-coming and where the old money would rub shoulders with the new. His tall, heavy figure, dressed in a white dinner jacket and a dress shirt embellished by an extravagant ruffle, betrayed that Seybolt’s origins were far from Back Bay Boston.

      At the start of the capital campaign Seybolt accompanied Rathbone to New York to meet with all the heads of the big foundations, the first time ever that the Museum had approached them for funding. Seybolt had already observed that Rathbone was “a master salesman.”¹⁶ He had watched him raise money for the acquisition of a medieval sculpture – the bewitching Virgin and Child on a Crescent Moon – in the midst of a dinner party, with not one person at the table suspecting they were being “set up.” In New York, as Rathbone recalled, they did their Mutt and Jeff act, with Rathbone talking up one aspect of the Museum, and Seybolt another. They made an odd pair – Rathbone, charming and ebullient, a person whose instinct was to make each encounter social and personal, easily conveying his knowledge and passion for art and for the Museum, alongside Seybolt, with his intimidating eagle eye and razor-sharp business sense to remind everyone exactly what they were really there for. With their assault on the big foundations, Rathbone and Seybolt garnered the first round of centennial donations.

      In 1968, as the centennial drew near, they had raised about $8 million, but their goal of $20 million was still far from achieved. Ralph Lowell retired as president of the board that year. Seybolt, who had vowed as a young boy that he would be president of something by the time he was forty,¹⁷ had surpassed his goal by his midfifties and was ready to be president of something else. Furthermore, he had proven to his fellow trustees that he had the administrative skills they either lacked or did not choose to apply to the MFA, and to some trustees he seemed to be the obvious candidate to succeed Lowell as president of the board.

      As the new president, Seybolt immediately laid out his agenda. The Great Inflation was up and running, and museums across the country were experiencing financial strain as never before. Seybolt’s approach was first of all to confront “the practical hard realities of the world”¹⁸ that his fellow board members had ignored. The MFA’s annual report of that year presented a dire picture. “1968 was a year of physical expansion, administrative enlargement, and financial retrenchment,”¹⁹ as Rathbone broadly stated the facts that year. Treasurer Jack Gardner admitted a deficit that had grown alarmingly “due to the net increase in exhibition expense”²⁰ and announced that a major overhaul of the budget was under way.

      Suddenly, everything had to be accounted for – every dollar, every minute of the day. “All of a sudden everyone woke up,” recalled Lewis Cabot. “How much did it cost to change a lightbulb? There were new ways to size up the total value of the museum as compared to the total cost of maintaining it, in ways taught at the Harvard Business School – the museum itself as one big cost operation.”²¹ In 1967, they estimated, it cost about $15,000 a day to keep the doors of the Museum open.

      Perry Townsend Rathbone, Director, and George Seybolt, President, Board of Trustees, 1967–1971.

      Seybolt’s appointment as president in 1968 also coincided with the Museum’s decision to charge admission for the first time in decades. It was an action Rathbone was reluctant to take, but in the face of the Museum’s financial straits, it was unavoidable – the kind of hard-nosed business decision that required a real businessman to make. As a result, attendance figures dropped for the first time since Rathbone had been director; until then they had been steadily on the rise. The downside of the admission charge, however, was somewhat mitigated by a related initiative that helped maintain the Museum’s democratic goals and commitment to the community: an appeal for public funds to admit children younger than age sixteen free of charge. Rathbone made the Museum’s case to the General Court, inviting city leaders and legislators to the Museum for luncheons and special tours, and aided by strong editorial support from the local press, the MFA received public