Following Ivan Gaskell’s comment on my post about Perry Rathbone, describing what it was like when he went as the Margaret S. Winthrop Curator to the Fogg in 1991, I freely confess that part of my interest in Rathbone’s diary was that it described a milieu that I discovered and hadn’t expected when I went to the Fogg as a Henry Fellow in 1976.

John Coolidge, who had been Director of the Fogg from 1948 to 1972 – a brahmin if ever there was one – was still teaching a course based on the research he had published in 1942 on Lowell, Massachusetts.  To this day, I wish I had taken it as the field trips might have given me a better knowledge of Massachusetts architecture.

And I was invited to celebrate Thanksgiving with Cornelius and Emily Vermeule.  Cornelius Vermeule III had been a curator of Classical Art at the MFA since 1957.

I realise now it was brahmin-land.  At the time, it seemed a bit unreal.