Alfred Frank Hardiman (1891–1949)

Sculptor. Born in London, son of a silversmith. On leaving school, he worked as an engineering draughtsman, studying in the evenings at the LCC Central School of Arts and Crafts. In 1912, he won an LCC scholarship to the Royal College of Art, gaining his diploma in 1915. In that same year he won a special talent scholarship and a British Institute scholarship, and although in July he entered the Royal Academy Schools, he shortly afterwards enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps as an engineer’s draughtsman. Following the end of the First World War, he resumed his studies, winning a Landseer Scholarship and, in December 1920, a Rome Scholarship in Sculpture. After four years at the British School in Rome, in 1924, he returned to London. This period, in which he studied classical art and was increasingly drawn to pre- and early classical Greek art, was a formative one. Various versions of the statue, Peace, executed around 1926, show the influence of archaic Greek sculpture. In the statue of St George, originally commissioned by Stephen Courtauld for his London house in Carlos Place around 1927 (now at Eltham Lodge), Hardiman took this classicism in the direction of a somewhat theatrical and encrusted art deco. An involvement in the decoration of municipal structures began when Hardiman was taken on in 1931 by the architect E. Stone Collins for the sculptural features in the final phase of the building of Ralph Knott’s County Hall in London, his contribution comprising allegorical groups in Portland stone for four of the window pavilions: Town Planning; Child Education; Recreation; and Care of the Sick. In 1938 he modelled impressive bronze lions for Norwich Town Hall, and in 1946 won the Royal Society of British Sculptors (RBS) gold medal for a fountain (never completed) for the New Council House in Bristol. Hardiman had been accepted as a member of the RBS as early as 1918; on the society’s division of its membership into Associates and Fellows in 1923 he had been elected an Associate, attaining full Fellowship in 1938. Hardiman’s best known and also most controversial commission was for the equestrian statue of Field Marshal Haig, for Whitehall, London, unveiled in 1936. His last work was the uncompleted Southwood Memorial Fountain (1947–48) for the churchyard of St James’s Piccadilly. Hardiman was elected ARA in 1936 and RA in 1944.

Bibliography: British School at Rome Fine Arts Archive: ‘Alfred Frank Hardiman (1891–1949)’; Building Times, June 1936, pp. 269–71 (‘The Work of Well-Known Sculptors. 18. – Mr. A.F. Hardiman)’; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. xvii, 95, 96, 102–04, 438; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. 23–25, 61; S. Crellin, ‘Hardiman, Alfred Frank (1891–1949)’, ODNB (online edn), 2004; V. Holman, ‘Alfred Hardiman, RA, and the vicissitudes of public sculpture in mid-twentieth-century Britain’, Sculpture Journal, Vol. 24.3 (2015), pp. 351–73; Illustrated London News, 12 February 1921, p. 194; Mapping Sculpture; D. Merritt and F. Greenacre, with K. Eustace, Public Sculpture of Bristol, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxxi, 79, 80; Royal Academy of Arts website: ‘Alfred Hardiman RA (1891–1949)’; Sculpture in 20th century Britain (ed. P. Curtis), (Henry Moore Institute), Leeds, 2003 (2 vols), vol. II, ‘A Guide to Sculptors in the Leeds Collection’, pp. 148–50 (entry on Hardiman by T. Rosoman); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxxvii, 53, 220–22, 419–23, 450; Who Was Who (online edn), 2007.

Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, November 2024