Nicholas Harding

Nicholas Harding (b. 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 Bachelor of Arts, he worked for twenty-two years as a freelance animator. Meanwhile, he 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.

Since 1994 he has been a regular exhibitor in the Archibald, Wynn, Dobell, and Sulman prizes. Most recently, Harding won the 2022 Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 2001, Harding won the Dobell Drawing Prize as well as the Archibald Prize. 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.