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Hubert Arthur Finney
(1905 - 1991)
Amy Ironing, circa 1953
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Hubert Arthur Finney (1905 - 1991)
Signed, inscribed with colour notes
Watercolour on paper
Size:
Height – 50.8cm
Width – 38.1cm
Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.70.
Exhibited: The Lightbox, Woking, Out of the Shadows, 2020, cat 13
Hubert Finney was a painter, draughtsman and teacher who trained initially at Bromley School of Art, where he attended evening classes from 1915, and then at Beckenham School of Art to where he won a trade scholarship in 1918. He studied painting with Amy Katherine Browning and etching with Eric Gill. Around 1927, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, where he was greatly influenced by the drawing classes of Percy Jowett. Finney would later remark:
‘He (Jewett) visited the school two or three days a week, and by the inspiration of his teaching gained our confidence and almost hero worship, transferring his own enthusiasm for drawing, and the beauty of classical construction of the human figure, to all who came under his instruction. I remember still with clarity, his beautiful selective demonstration drawings on the side of our own drawings, which we eventually cut out and treasure. But like so many things in life they became lost. It became a lively little school, and it had a small garden at the back in which we had models sittingdrawing, fine summer days. If my life at home had been happier and my father had been less disruptive in his influence in the home, these days could have been happy ones during my study in this school. One ofmy great regret is that I did not preserve or try to keep some of the drawings and paintings that I made during these formative years, when one’s vision was fresh and one’s emotional response to things was intense and full of excitement. . . .’
A reclusive figure whose work has remained largely unseen, Finney studied under Eric Gill before winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in the early 1920’s; his closest friends there were Charles Mahoney,(1903-1968), Gerald Ososki (1903-1981) and Barnett Freedman (1901-1958). Finney had the good fortune to attend the RCA as part of a golden generation, many of whom went on to become some of Britain’s best loved artists (amongst them Ravilious, Bawden, Hepworth, Moore, Dunbar, Sorrell, and Piper). After a travelling scholarship to Rome, in 1929, Finney returned to become a teacher at Chelsea School of Art – working alongside Henry Moore who was in charge of the Sculpture Department and Graham Sutherland, the Department of Design.
From 1927-1934 he exhibited at the NEAC. In 1935 his painting Mother and Child was acquired by Carlisle Art Gallery. During WW2 Finney worked for the light rescue service of the Civil Defense.
After the war he taught part time under Anthony Betts at Reading University and was in charge of life drawing there when he retired in 1970. Although he was reluctant to show his work he did exhibit at the RA Summer exhibition (in 1950 and 1954) and the Portrait Society and at The Paris Salon. A large solo exhibition took place at the University of Oxford’s Institute of Education in 1964, and at The Lightbox, Woking, in 2022.
We are grateful to Nicholas Finney and David Buckman for assistance.
