Belgian painter and potter. He studied painting at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts et Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Brussels from 1878 to 1880. He was a founder-member of Les XXGLOSSARYA group that began with 20 Belgian painters and sculptors as well as critics, founded to organize juryless exhibitions following their dissatisfaction with the selection process of the Brussels Academy and the Paris Salon. The group did not represent any one style, but exhibited works of Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau, all together. The artist group played a significant role in the modernization of art in Belgium by inviting foreign artists as well to the exhibitions, including Whistler, Monet, and Renoir. The frequent participation of Signac and Seurat led to the development of an independent Belgian Neo-Impressionism with international flair.Important members of Les Vingts included, among others, James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff, Theo van Rysselberghe, and Henri van der Velde. The group dissolved itself in 1893 after holding a total of 126 exhibitions., a group of 20 avant-garde artists who held annual exhibitions of paintings and decorative arts between 1884 and 1895. Initially Finch painted land- and seascapes in the Impressionist style.
In 1887 he saw Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon at the Ile de la Grande Jatte, and he became the first Belgian to adopt Neo-ImpressionismGLOSSARYAn artistic trend that developed toward the end of the nineteenth century and became a revival movement for Impressionist painting. The Impressionist technique of juxtaposing small amounts of colour to create the impression of a total area that first becomes whole in the perception of the viewer was elevated to the supreme principle of painting and refined by Georges Seurat. Seurat wanted to give the spontaneous, impressionistic painting process a scientific foundation. His theories are underpinned by studies in physics, optics, and colour theory by Chevreul, Blanc, and Rood. Unbroken points of colour set directly next to each other (Pointillism, Divisionism, or Chromo-Luminarism) reflect not only the colour value of the depicted object, but also convey the colour of light as a reflection of the object, Other representatives of Neo-Impressionism include Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro and Henri-Edmond Cross.. In 1889 he exhibited for the first time with the Indépendants in Paris. From 1891 he concentrated on ceramics.
In 1897 he was appointed Director of a ceramics concern in Finland. He introduced Finnish painters to the new styles of Neo-ImpressionismGLOSSARYA style of painting that became prominent in the last quarter of the 19th century as a reaction to the ossified doctrine of the Academy and the content-oriented atelier, historical, and genre painting. The name is derived from the 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet, and first was used by art critics as a mocking description for a group of artists excluded from the official Salon, but who had their own first group exhibition in 1874 at the salon of the Parisian photographer Nadar. Impressionism, as a new type of naturalism, negated classical pictorial methods; based on contemporary theories of physics, it indicated the natural object in a revolutionary fashion - entirely as a manifestation of colour. Their supreme principle was "plein-air" or open-air painting, through which the painters tried to capture a direct, spontaneous impression of what they saw. and worked at the revival of Finnish architecture.
