Alfred William (Willy) Finch was born in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, a suburb of Brussels, on 28th November 1854. His family were originally from Exeter but had settled in Belgium in around 1818, and Finch spent his youth in Ostend, where there was a sizeable British community. In 1878 he joined Joseph van Severdonck’s class at the Academy of Fine Arts, Brussels, and two years later he made his artistic debut at Ghent’s Salon Triennial, after which his work adopted a more avant-garde stance. He was a member of the Chrysalide group, and of L’Essor, and in 1883 he was involved in the founding of Les XX, to which he invited Whistler, whom he very much admired, to exhibit in the first exhibition the following February.

Finch’s discovery of Monet in 1886 steered him towards a very personal form of Impressionism, with a marked emphasis on realism. The following year, inspired by the work shown at the Salon des XX by Georges Seurat (La Grande-Jatte), Finch immediately applied himself to the study of divisionist principles. These he adopted in his own painting, becoming the prime Belgian exponent of the style. Converted to the ideas of John Ruskin, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, the development of which he was able to observe during his frequent trips to England, Finch began to shift his attention to the decorative arts, notably ceramics, a craft which he practised first at La Louvière and later at Virginal and Forges-lez-Chimay.

Finch moved to Finland at the request of the industrialist Louis Sparre, to direct the ceramics department of the Iris company at Borgå from 1897 to 1901. Later he settled in Helsinki, where he died on 28th April 1930. Finch’s creativity and rigorous approach, and his teaching at the School of Decorative Arts from 1902 – pursued in tandem with his career as a painter – established him as one of the pioneers of modern European design. He promoted Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Scandinavia, championing in particular the work of Signac. His name has been likened with that of Magnus Enckell and Sigurd Frosterus as the protagonists of a renewal of Finnish painting, manifested in 1912 in the formation of the Septem group.

Zeegezicht (1886-87) was painted at the very beginning of Finch’s turn to divisionism. It was exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists in 1888, an amazingly avant-garde contribution to the society for this time. Pointillist paintings such as this one very rarely appear at auction, although The Breakwater at Heyst, Overcast Sky (1889-90) – a masterpiece of Japanese-style-wave painting – sold for $82,500 at auction in New York in 1983.

In 1888, a spokesperson (probably Emile Verhaeren) for 'L’Art modern' praised Finch for his talents as a colourist: “here we have M. Finch, the first of the Belgians to move decisively into the ranks of the Neo-Impressionists, adopting division of tone, rejecting mixture on the palette, allowing only the colours of the spectrum and using only these”.