Virgil Finlay
| Virgil Finlay | |
|---|---|
Finlay in 1969
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| Born |
Virgil Warden Finlay July 23, 1914 Rochester, New York |
| Died | January 18, 1971 (aged 56) |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Illustration |
| Awards | Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist, 1945 (Retro Hugo awarded in 1996); Hugo Award for Best Interior Illustrator, 1953; Science Fiction Hall of Fame, 2012 |
Virgil Finlay (July 23, 1914 – January 18, 1971) was an American pulp fantasy, science fiction and horror illustrator. He has been called "part of the pulp magazine history ... one of the foremost contributors of original and imaginative art work for the most memorable science fiction and fantasy publications of our time." While he worked in a range of media, from gouache to oils, Finlay specialized in, and became famous for, detailed pen-and-ink drawings accomplished with abundant stippling, cross-hatching, and scratchboard techniques. Despite the very labor-intensive and time-consuming nature of his specialty, Finlay created more than 2600 works of graphic art in his 35-year career.
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted Finlay in 2012.
Virgil Warden Finlay was born and raised in Rochester, New York; his father, woodworker Warden Hugh Finlay, died at age 40 in the midst of the Great Depression, leaving his family (widow Ruth and two children, Jean and Virgil) in straitened circumstances. By his high school years, Virgil Finlay was exercising his passions for art and poetry, and discovered his lifelong subject matter in the pulp magazines of the era—science fiction in Amazing Stories (1927), fantasy and horror in Weird Tales (1928)—and began to exhibit at the age of 16. By age 21 he was confident enough in his art to send six pieces, unsolicited, to editor Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales, who determined that such detailed work would transfer successfully to relatively rough paper the magazine used (they were called "pulps" for a reason). Wright began buying Finlay's work, which debuted with illustrations of three different stories in the December 1935 issue and appeared in 62 issues including the last in September 1954. He also created 19 color covers for Weird Tales numbers from February 1937 to March 1953. (In the latter year he won one of the inaugural Hugo Awards, as the previous year's best "Interior Illustrator"; cover artists and interior illustrators were not thereafter distinguished by the Hugo Award for Best Artist under various names. He was also named the best artist of 1945 in the 50-year Retro Hugos of 1996.)
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