Joy Finzi

Joy Finzi (March 3, 1907 - June 14, 1991) was an artist and founder of the Finzi Trust, a foundation named for her deceased husband, composer Gerald Finzi.

She was born Joyce Black in Hampstead, London. She studied music and art, and married Finzi in 1933. They had two sons, Christopher and Nigel.

Together with her husband, Finzi played an important part in founding the Newbury String Players. She devoted much time to preserving the work of composer-poet Ivor Gurney, continuing her husband's work after his premature death in 1956. She sketched portraits of contemporary musicians including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Adrian Boult, Howard Ferguson and Sir Arthur Bliss, and writers including Edmund Blunden, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sylvia Townsend Warner and David Jones.

In 1969, she founded the Finzi Trust to finance the recording of her husband Gerald's work and that of other composers, and was instrumental in the formation of Finzi Friends in 1982, a society furthering the work of the Trust. She continued to draw and sculpt, and published two volumes of poetry A Point of Departure and Twelve Months of a Year. A collection of her portrait drawings was published in an edition of 300 by Libanus Press in 1987, with the title In That Place.

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