 In 1956 he was in turn succeeded by Janet McFarlane, who was at the time one of only seven women serving as a museum director in the U.S. Five years later, the museum's Women's Council, which has since become a major fundraiser and source of volunteers, was founded.A year after curator Norman Rice began a 20-year tenure as director in 1967, the Rice family donated their old house on the corner, expanded sympathetically in 1940, to the museum.It renovated the 1895 Beaux-Arts home designed by Richard Morris Hunt, architect of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and several mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, in the style of a 15th-century Italian palazzo for use both as offices and gallery space.