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Hubert Arthur Finney:
The Toll Bridge, Little Hampton, 1938
Framed (ref: 10013)
Signed and inscribed 'Little Hampton'. Pencil and gouache on paper.

Tags: Hubert Arthur Finney drawing gouache pencil architecture landscape painted en plein air transport

Provenance: The Artist's Estate; Private collection

Finney described his aim as an artist as being to capture "natures beauty in all her extended forms leading to an awareness of the metaphysical".  Considering Finney's oeuvre as a whole it becomes increasingly clear that whilst he painted his surroundings with apparent ease and great facility, his pictures were a product more of personal struggle than an expression of a joie de vivre: work was, he said, "a means of survival, in the battle for living". 

For Finney, who had a reclusive personality, drawing and painting served both as a means to approach the world but also as a place where he could find refuge from it. His subject matter moved unconsciously between two domains – that of daylight hours, and that of the night. The former resulted in compositions capturing subtle changes in light and colour, but there is almost always a sense of light fading, dissipating into the dark.