About nicholas harding
Nicholas Harding (1956-2022) is a highly regarded British-Australian artist known for his large scale painted portraits and pen and ink drawings. Harding came to Australia from England as a six-year-old. After studying for a BA he worked for twenty-two years as a freelance animator. Meanwhile, he was became known, early on, for huge pen and ink depictions of the railway tracks and shabby streets of inner Sydney, and the scrubby trees of the beaches of the north coast of New South Wales. His lush paintings on the same themes, as well as flowers, beach and river scenes and caravan parks are now in high demand from collectors.
From 1994 he was a regular exhibitor in the Archibald, Wynne, Dobell, and Sulman prizes. In 2001, the first of several triumphant years, Harding won the Dobell Drawing Prize as well as the Archibald, and won the Wynne Prize in 2022. Harding was the most-represented artist in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Idle Hours in 2009-2010. A major retrospective of his work, Nicholas Harding: Drawn to Paint was at the SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney over the same period.
Harding's work is held in the collections at the National Gallery Canberra, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Newcastle Region Art Gallery.
