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 publicationat least not in his lifetime.amp10amp10Alone in his study at the end of a day Rathbone wrote in a large unlined sketchbook unloading whatever was fresh on his mind. Whether a meeting at the museum a business trip or a party he had just returned from he wrote about whom he met what he thought of them the ambiance the conversation the art the wine and the food.amp10amp10Rathbones journals provide a window onto an era of seismic cultural change seen through the eyes of an art czar and a tastemaker. There are meetings with artists such as William de Kooning Edward Hopper Andrew Wyeth Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Calder men of letters such as T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley. There are candid impressions of the collectors he courted entertained and forbore such as Peggy Guggenheim and Joseph Pulitzer and of the eccentric Boston Brahmin families with historic ties to the MFAamp8212the Lowells Lambs Warrens Coolidges and Codmans. And of course he writes of the thrill of assisting Jaqueline Kennedy in the early 1960s with loans from the MFA to adorn the private quarters in the White House.amp10amp10In the Company of Art opens with journal entries from the later years of Rathboneamp8217s time at the St. Louis Art Museum in the early 1950s. But the greatest concentration of entries focuses on the early 1960s during the banner years of Rathboneamp8217s directorship of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston the meteoric Rathbone Era when he began to enjoy the rewards of his achievements at the museum with new acquisitions renovated galleries rising attendance and membership. amp8220Many of the museums great acquisitionsamp8221 the Boston Globe wrote amp8220can be credited to Perry Rathbone the legendary director of the MFA.amp8221amp10amp10Urbane and charismatic R