He lived in Italy for many years, where he was on the periphery of the Shelley circle and was a friend and patron to a number of British expatriate artists.
He considered himself debonair and extended friendship and patronage to expatriate British artists in Italy - including Joseph Severn, Sir Charles Eastlake, William Etty and in later in his life Crabb Robinson - who on the whole thought him vain and pretentious.
[3] Finch died at his home, the Palazzo del Re di Prussia, in Rome, on 16 September 1830, from malarial fever.
[5] Warwick Wroth, his biographer in the Dictionary of National Biography, writing in 1889, stated that "Finch had a great love of the fine arts, and studied antiquities and topography.
He left his library, pictures, coins, and medals to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and his plate to Balliol College".
[5] Since that time the reputation of his collection has tarnished as art historians have re-evaluated its paintings and found the previous attributions to major artists to have been wrong, and its coins and Napoleonic medals are not now considered to be of any special note.