Euretta Rathbone

In July 1947 Perry Rathbone, director of the city art museum in St. Louis, travelled to Amsterdam with his wife Euretta to see Max Beckmann about an exhibition. By the autumn Beckmann was living in St. Louis himself, teaching at the art school of Washington University, and the two couples became close friends. Rathbone ordered this portrait of his wife that same year. It is the first portrait Beckmann finished in the United States, and he wrote the place into the signature at upper right, Beckmann S.L. 47, for St. Louis. Euretta de Cosson was born in Cairo in 1909, the daughter of a British official who headed public works in Egypt, and she had been captain of the British women's ski team. In 1948 Beckmann painted Perry too, and the exhibition they had planned opened in St. Louis that May. Rathbone later became director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The portrait stayed in the family until 2018, when the couple's daughter Eliza sold it to that museum.