The Boston Perry

On In the Company of Art: A Museum Director's Private Journals by Perry T. Rathbone, edited by Belinda Rathbone.

Back before connoisseurship became a dirty word, a generation of museum directors learned to know by the senses through a Harvard course prosaically titled "Museum Work and Museum Problems." Created and taught by Paul Sachs (1878-1965), a scion of both Goldman and Sachs and a former Wall Street investor himself, the postgraduate course educated its "scholar-connoisseurs" on matters of quality through visits with art dealers in New York and object lessons and dinners at Sachs's Cambridge home Shady Hill. The instruction was hands-on, from the study of Greek coinage, to the maintenance of an institution's physical plant, to the cultivation of museum benefactors. In every case, students honed their powers of discernment while learning how to flip the coin, turn the switch, and seal the deal.

Perry T. Rathbone (1911-2000) was a Sachs graduate who applied these lessons con brio. In the Company of Art presents this museum director's newly published "private journals" as selected and introduced by his daughter Belinda Rathbone. Beginning in the early 1950s, when he was the director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, but focused on his subsequent and transformative seventeen-year tenure at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the journals and letters collected here find Rathbone "writing in earnest" as he took the helm of a large and luffing institution on the flood tide of postwar expansion. "What dreary galleries, what gloom! And what a behemoth it is!" he wrote to his wife, Euretta de Cosson Rathbone, a highborn British ski racer whom he variously addresses as Rettles, Ret, and Rett, upon arrival in Boston in May 1955.

The journals of many a not-for-profit manager might have limited appeal, even ones documenting important moments, but Rathbone's were never weighed down with meetings and memos. "My father's journals are filled with his feelings," notes Belinda, a New Criterion contributor who has written about Sachs for these pages ("Museum work & museum problems," December 2018). In the Company of Art locates her father "at the peak of his powers, at the crest of his career, old enough to look back as far as he could look forward."

The journals convey the observations of...