Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, curator of classical art, 1957-1996. Vermeule's grandfather was Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule I (1859-1950), a prominent civil engineer for New Jersey and New York. His father was Colonel Cornelius Vermeule II (1896-1943) director of the New Jersey Public Works Administration, and his mother was Catherine Comstock (Vermeule). The younger Vermeule began collecting ancient coins--a lifelong interest--as a boy in 1934 in England. Vermeule entered Harvard in 1943 but the suicide of his father and onset of World War II caused him to join the Army.