John Walker; National Gallery Director Helped Build Collection

John Walker, whose work as chief curator and director helped build the National Gallery of Art into one of the world’s leading museums, has died at his home in Amberley, in Sussex, England. He was 88.

He died Sunday of cardiopulmonary arrest.

Walker spent more than three decades at the National Gallery in Washington, joining as chief curator in 1938, three years before the museum opened, and becoming director in 1956.

By the time he retired in 1969, the gallery’s collection had increased from 400 artworks to more than 2,000 paintings, 300 sculptures and hundreds of smaller bronzes.

He wrote about his creation in the 1976 art book “The National Gallery of Art: One Thousand Masterpieces.” Several of his acquisitions were also featured in another of his books, “Portraits: 5,000 Years” published in 1984.

Walker was known for convincing the country’s greatest art collectors that they should give their works to the nation’s museum, rather than to their local museums.

He was credited with strengthening the private collection of Los Angeles business magnate Armand Hammer. In particular, he built Hammer’s superlative collection of drawings. But Walker’s typical price included the agreement that Hammer eventually donate them to the National Gallery. Hammer made that promised gift in 1987, and the prized drawings were never a part of the Westwood museum Hammer created to house his art collection shortly before his death in 1990.

In addition to working with Hammer, Walker contributed to the California art community by serving as a trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the 1950s.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1906, Walker was afflicted at age 13 with infantile paralysis. During the months he was confined to a wheelchair he explored art galleries and decided he would someday run a museum.

He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University, where he helped start a modern art gallery. After Harvard, he won a fellowship as an apprentice to the art critic and scholar of Renaissance art Bernard Berenson at I Tatti, Berenson’s 18th-Century villa near Florence.

Walker spent two years as dean of students at the American Academy in Rome. While there in 1937, he married Margaret Drummond, the daughter of the Earl of Perth, Britain’s ambassador to Italy. She died in 1987.

Walker’s relationship with the National Gallery began in 1937 when he learned that former U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon was founding an art museum in Washington. Walker approached Mellon’s son, Paul, a childhood friend from Pittsburgh. Walker helped the museum’s director, David Finley, design the gallery’s structure and its collection. It opened in 1941.

In retirement, Walker lived in Florida, Fishers Island, N.Y., and England.

Survivors include a daughter, Gillian Walker Maysles of New York, and three grandchildren. A son, John Anthony Walker, died in 1986.