However, records of a secondary market for the man who contributed significant works to the Objective Abstraction movement of 1933-7 and exhibited regularly alongside Ben Nicholson and William Scott are thinner on the ground. There is scarcely a record of a Hubert selling in the saleroom.
Reputations come and go in the art world but that Hubert contributed to his own anonymity is without question.
He was, by all accounts, an exceptionally shy man whose failure to play the flesh-pressing game required of the successful artist left the vast body of his work hidden since the 1950s in the possession of three nieces. Accordingly, while prices for his contemporaries in the Modern British School gathered momentum he was among those names falling off the radar.
Hubert's descendants are, however, keen to have his work seen by a new generation of picture buyers and their decision to offload 40 paintings from the estate provided The Fine Art Society with a rare opportunity to hang an exhibition of Mod Brit pictures which are not only academically interesting but also pleasing to the modern eye and affordable.
Hubert might not be tried and tested in the saleroom but, in the context of a market that is pushing prices by his contemporaries into the stratosphere, pictures priced at £750-8500 evidently looked very good value to FAS customers.
Helped by a whiff of market speculation (one buyer decided to take 16 pictures) all 40 works had sold out just two days after the opening of the exhibition on Tuesday, March 14.
