“Over the years as the director of the St. Louis Art Museum and later the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Perry T. Rathbone kept a journal. These are his unguarded and spontaneous expressions of the moment, not meant for publication – at least not in his lifetime.”

Excerpts from his journal were selected and published by his daughter Belinda: In the Company of Art: A Museum Director’s Private Journals is out now from David R. Godine. The cover is of Karsh and Rathbone by Ivan Dmitri, with whom Karsh worked on the “Photography in the Fine Arts” series. See who else they photographed for that project.

6 October 1964
Busy all day with the greatest living portrait photographer, Yousuf Karsh of Ottawa. This fabled artist whose work I have admired for years came Sunday with Ivan Dimitri of New York to “case” the museum and meet me there preparatory to doing my portrait today. He is an intense short man with big bulbous eyes and nose, a bald head, and a gray fringe of longish hair around it. Quick and elastic in his movements, in spite of some sixty years I guess, he cuts a wide swath with his vision and responds eagerly and quickly to all he sees and feels. A tour of the whole main floor of the museum is a lot for one and a half hours but Karsh was equal to it.

Today he posed me in five galleries amongst the impressionists, in front of the Greco and Fra Felix, the R. van der Weyden, the Boston “throne,” and a niche in the hemicycle.

Mr. K. has a lot of charm at his fingertips, displayed extraordinary patience and a power of concentration that impressed me very much. He has a trick of bringing you to keen attention at the crucial moment of the shutter by whispering, “Beautiful, do not move at all!” Then he says “Dear Sir, look here, head down, look there, etc.” His English is almost perfect, but with a middle eastern accent. He is an Armenian. Of course he has a kind of sixth sense. His antennae are tuned to personality and I felt all day that I was undergoing an analytical study. He must have used up a hundred plates on me, and interspersed them with Polaroid shots for the first time– to take a “reading” on what he was doing. While he worked, the tireless [van) Dimitri made endless candid shots of the operation. Mr. K. has elegant taste, perfectly pressed suit, conspicuous cuff buttons and initials on the cuff! “Now you are speaking to a friend”: “Now your thoughts are far away, not on the present,” he was fond of saying.

See more portraits of Perry T. Rathbone.