Nicholas Harding

Biography

In 2001 Nicholas Harding won the Archibald Prize, Australia’s main prize for portraiture, with “John Bell as King Lear”. The same year he won the Dobell Drawing Prize with a view of Eddy Avenue in Sydney and received the Centenary Medal, issued to mark a hundred years of Australian federation. He was forty-five, and for almost half his life he had not been regarded as a serious painter.

He was born in London in 1956. In 1965 the family emigrated to Australia and settled in Normanhurst, a Sydney suburb that still bordered the bush at that time. At home they loved classical music, theatre and the visual arts. His parents subscribed to Punch, and the boy copied its cartoons. In early 1973 the teenage magazine GoSet printed his drawings of Mick Jagger and Nicky Hopkins. He became an Australian citizen in 1974.

After school Harding began studying art but abandoned the course in 1975, worked at a petrol station and hitchhiked around Europe. Back in Sydney, he took a job at an advertising agency.

From 1977 he trained as an animator at the Australian branch of the American studio Hanna-Barbera. In the 1980s that studio and Disney employed several hundred artists in Australia. Harding worked on cartoons featuring Scooby-Doo, Black Beauty, Blinky Bill, Dinky Dog and Kwicky Koala, and in the middle of the decade he joined the team making the feature film “Footrot Flats”. He taught himself to paint, and I think the animation work gave him a great deal: by his own account it taught him the structure and habits of animals, and animals appear more than once in his portraits beside well-known people. His first solo exhibition was held in 1992 at the dealer Rex Irwin, with whom he worked for many years and showed almost every year. For a while he kept working full time as an animator, and from 2000 Irwin paid him a monthly stipend so that he could devote himself to painting alone.

He painted in oil with a thick, sculpted touch. He also made watercolours and large drawings in pen and ink: railway tracks and shabby streets of inner Sydney, scrub along the north coast of New South Wales. The same subjects appear in his paintings, joined by flowers, beaches, river views and caravan parks.

From 1994 to 2006, thirteen years in a row, he was a finalist for the Archibald Prize, and several times after that; in 2005 his “Bob’s Daily Swim” won the People’s Choice Award. In 2006 the painting “Beach Life (Pink Zinc and Figures)” brought him the first Kilgour Prize, at Newcastle Art Gallery, and in 2015 his self-portrait “Beached (Yuraygir Self Portrait)” won the People’s Choice Award of the National Self-Portrait Prize. In 2013 the Art Gallery of New South Wales gave him a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and in the same year he was elected a member of the Australian Watercolour Institute. He won the Wynne Prize, the Australian prize for landscape, in 2022 with “Eora”, although he had reached the final before.

He had more than forty solo exhibitions and more than a hundred group shows. In 2010 the Ervin Gallery in Sydney held “Drawn to Paint”, a survey of twenty-five years of his work, and in 2017–2018 the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra showed “28 Portraits”. The National Portrait Gallery bought “Robert Drewe (in the swell)” in 2010, and its collection later gained portraits of Hugo Weaving, Richard Roxburgh and John Olsen. His work is also in the National Gallery of Australia and in the galleries of New South Wales, South Australia, Newcastle and the Tweed River. In 2020 he published “From the Wings”, a limited-edition book of 312 pages of his theatre rehearsal drawings from 2013 to 2018.

Harding died on 2 November 2022. Less than two weeks later an exhibition of his last landscapes opened at Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane.