New Pilot, New Course

When Lawyer David Edward Finley, now 65, became first director of Washington's National Gallery, the nation's No. 1 showplace was scheduled to open with a meager ratio of only 30 works to every acre of pink marble halls. But in 18 years of skillful piloting, Director Finley has steered into the National Gallery outstanding private collections owned by such millionaire art lovers as Samuel H. Kress, Chester Dale and Lessing J. Rosenwald, and has watched the collection swell to more than 1,200 paintings and 326 sculptures. Under Finley the gallery gained a place among the world's first-rank art museums.

Last week Director Finley, having good reason to be satisfied with a job well done, announced that he will retire July 1. His successor: erudite and affable John Walker, 49, who, as the National Gallery's chief curator since 1939, has been Finley's right-hand man.

To his new job Art Historian Walker brings the wealth of knowledge he first began storing up when, at 13, an attack of infantile paralysis set him haunting the galleries of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum in a wheelchair. Convinced that he wanted to become a museum man, Walker went to Harvard ('30), breezed through the Fogg Museum training course summa cum laude, found time on the side to found (with Balletomane Lincoln Kirstein and Esthete Edward M. M. Warburg) the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art (profaned by other Harvard-men as the Society for Contemptuous Art) and contribute to Kirstein's then fashionable, upperbrow Hound and Horn.

Walker topped off his art schooling with a John Harvard scholarship and a chance to study in Italy for three years with Renaissance Connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Walker recalls the period as "sheer, undiluted bliss." Equally pleased with his prize pupil, "B.B." calls Walker "my favorite biped." In 1935 Walker was appointed fine arts director at the American Academy in Rome; there he married the daughter of British Ambassador Sir Eric Drummond, the late Earl of Perth. He came home in 1938 to help lay the groundwork for the National Gallery.

In his new top billet, Director Walker's task will be to shift the Washington National Gallery's emphasis from collecting (80% of gallery space is already filled) to the development of a center for popular art education and scholarly research.

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