Nicholas Harding (1956–2022) was one of Australia's most highly regarded artists, known for his portraits and drawings, and his light-filled, vigorously painted images of the bush and the coast. Born in London, he came to Australia with his family as a boy and attained a Bachelor of Arts in 1975. After a couple of years travelling in Europe and the UK, he trained as an animator with the cartoon company Hanna Barbera, and then worked as a freelance animator for over twenty years. Meanwhile, he taught himself to paint and was first exhibited in the Sulman Prize in 1980. He held his first solo exhibition with Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, in 1992, subsequently showing multiple times with Irwin over the next twenty years and exhibiting also with Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne. Harding 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 paintings on the same themes, as well as flowers, and beach and river scenes, became much sought-after by collectors. He won the Mosman Art Prize in 1993 and from that year onward featured regularly in the Archibald Prize, the Wynne Prize, the Dobell Drawing Prize, the Sulman Prize and the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. In 2001, the first of several triumphant years, Harding won the Dobell Prize and triumphed in the Archibald with his Portrait of John Bell as King Lear. A major retrospective of his work, Nicholas Harding: Drawn to Paint, was exhibited at the SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney in 2010; and the Tweed Regional Gallery presented Carving Light and Landscape in 2015. In 2017 the National Portrait Gallery presented Nicholas Harding: 28 Portraits, which encompassed everything from swiftly-executed portraits of anonymous sitters that Harding sketched mid-flight on airline sick bags, to lush, large scale paintings of sitters including writer Robert Drewe and actor Hugo Weaving – both of which are held in the NPG’s collection.
Harding held residencies at the Cité des Arts Internationales in Paris (2013) and at Bundanon, New South Wales (1998). His work is represented in private, corporate and public collections internationally and at home, including those of the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Portrait Gallery.
