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Hubert Arthur Finney:
Parliament Hill by Moonlight with View of London Beyond
Framed (ref: 6656)

Thinned oil on panel

10 4/5 x 13 3/4 in. (27.4 x 35 cm)

Tags: Hubert Arthur Finney oil panel landscape men night scenes and sleep trees 1.H.A.Finney

Provenance: The Artist's Studio

Exhibited: The Lightbox, Woking, Out of the Shadows, 2020, cat 81

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). All four appear together in Freedman's group portrait, The Stanhope Street Group (1926). Finney had the good fortune to attend the RCA as part of a generation that were to become amongst Britain's best loved artists (Ravilious, Bawden, Hepworth, Moore, Dunbar, Sorrell, Piper etc). 

Equally versatile when working on canvas or paper, his compositions are characterised by a distinctive use of colour and design, similar in many ways to that of Ravilious, through which everyday scenes and topography are transformed through an underlying sense of pattern. Finney's work is saturated with a the aesthetic now much associated with the mid-century Recording Britain project. After a travelling scholarship to Rome in 1924, Finney took a teaching post to work alongside Percy Jowett at Chelsea School of Art, and later Reading University.

This painting has a seascape sketch to reverse