David E. Finley, Jr.

David Edward Finley, Jr. (September 1, 1890 – February 1, 1977) was an American cultural leader during the middle third of the 20th century. He was the first director of the National Gallery of Art, the founding chairman of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a prime mover in the founding of the National Portrait Gallery, and founding chairman of the White House Historical Association. During the Second World War, Finley led the Roberts Commission, which led the rescue of much of the threatened artworks of Europe.

Finley was born at York, South Carolina, the son of Congressman David E. Finley (1862–1917) and Elizabeth Lewis Gist, of a family prominent in South Carolina before and during the American Civil War. He was graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1910 and took a law degree at George Washington University in 1913. He learned the workings of Washington working for his father’s congressional committee from 1910 to 1915, and then practiced law in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. before and after the First World War, in which he served in the U.S. Army Air Service and with the War Department afterwards in soldier reemployment.

As the eldest of eight siblings, Finley provided financial and moral support to an extended family in South Carolina and elsewhere after his father died in 1917 and throughout his own life. In 1931, he married Margaret Morton Eustis (1903–1977), a Washington heiress, sculptor and architect, at her family’s country home at Oatlands, near Leesburg, Virginia, where the Finleys later established their own country residence. Their Washington home was in Georgetown, at 3318 O Street, NW, where they led an active social life with political and social leaders. During World War II, and for many years afterwards, Margaret Finley was a full-time volunteer for the American Red Cross. The Finleys had no natural children, but in 1935 they took into their home Renee and Joan Beauregard, the two orphaned daughters of friends, whom they raised as their wards.

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