Sculptor and painter, born in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. He trained in the studio of his uncle, the sculptor Harry Bates, and worked under the sculptor and painter John Macallan Swan. His earliest works include the monument to the 14-year-old George Kenneth Vansittart-Neale (d. 1904) in the Church of All Saints, Bisham, Buckinghamshire; a marble statuette-group, Polar Bears at Play (exh. Royal Academy, 1909), which he later presented to Queen’s University, Belfast; and a wall monument to George Hussey Packe for St Andrew’s Church, Prestwold, Leicestershire (1912). During the First World War he saw active service as a Corporal in the Royal Engineers and in 1917 was wounded at Ypres. Like his former employer, Macallan Swan, Harding had a particular interest in painting and sculpting animals. He carved a life-size lion in stone for his First World War memorial at Eastergate, West Sussex (unveiled 19 December 1920) and in 1921 became a member of the Society of Animal Painters. He had been elected a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1912 but in 1923, following the society’s division of its members into Associates and Fellows, he was elected an Associate (his name was removed from the roll of members in 1932 following his failure to meet the arrears of his subscriptions). In 1925, he was invited by Sir Charles Nicholson, then consultant architect for St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast, to produce some of the building’s sculptural decoration. This was to be his most important commission, occupying him for much of the next 23 years: he carved the capitals of seven of the nave columns and several groups on the portals of the West Front. For a while, he shared the studio in Holywood, County Down, of one of his fellow sculptors on the cathedral, Sophia Rosamund Praeger, and carved the base for her sculpture, Johnny the Jig. Other commissions in Belfast include, for St Peter’s Church, Antrim Road, a side chapel reredos and a font (working model exhibited at the Ulster Academy of Arts, 1934) and for the Masonic Hall, Crumlin Road, an overdoor in stone (working model exhibited at the Ulster Academy, 1940, and the Royal Hibernian Academy, 1941). In 1931 he was elected to the Ulster Academy of Arts (President, 1947–48) and in 1933 to the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts. In 1938 he designed a frieze of 15 panels (45.7 m long and 1.2 m deep) for the Northern Ireland Government’s pavilion at the Glasgow Empire Exhibition, assisted by Poppy Mollan and John Luke. One of his latest works is the tomb of the Seventh Marquess of Londonderry for Mount Stewart, County Down, the working model for which he exhibited at the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts in 1950. In the same year he was awarded the OBE.
Harding exhibited widely throughout his working life: at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, in 1901; the Royal Academy, 1907–30; the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, 1919 and 1923; the Royal Scottish Academy, 1922; the Royal Hibernian Academy, 1929–53; the (Royal from 1950) Ulster Academy of Arts, 1931–50; and the Exhibition of Contemporary Ulster Art, part of the Festival of The Arts, Belfast, 1951.
Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; Dictionary of Ulster Biography: ‘George Frederick Morris Harding (1874–1964): Sculptor’; Mapping Sculpture; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 136–37; Who Was Who (online edn), 2007.
Terry Cavanagh, March 2025