George Frederick Morris Harding was born at Stevenage, Hertfordshire on 29 April 1874. He was trained in the studio of his uncle Harry Bates and also worked under J M Swan, RA (1847-1910). Harding taught modelling, stone carving and life drawing at the London County Council Technical Institute. He exhibited at both the RA and RGIFA. He came to early prominence with his life-size figure of G K Vansittart-Neale, who died at Eton, aged 14 in 1904. The statue may be found in the Church of All Saints, Bisham, Buckinghamshire. His marble Polar Bears at Play, 1909 may be found at Queen’s University, Belfast. Harding exhibited at the RA, the London Salon, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; GIFA and at Milan. His unusual Eastergate War Memorial (1921) in Sussex takes the form of a lion crouching on a monolithic plinth. In a search for work in 1925, Harding went to see the architect Sir Charles Nicholson, who asked if he would be interested in working on St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast. Harding did not hesitate and liked Belfast so much, he spent the rest of his life there. He settled in Holywood, County Down, and for the next twelve years, working with the sculptress Rosamund Praeger (1867-1954), he sculpted the seven nave columns and corbels of St Anne’s. He also executed the groups in the portals of the West Front, which he completed first. High up on the West Front are four unusual groups The Four Aces. ‘Industry’ is represented by a man digging with a spade; ‘Strife’ by two men fighting with clubs; ‘Hearts’ by a man and a girl holding hands; and ‘Diamonds’ by a miser with his money bag. The capitals Harding executed were: Agriculture, Arts, Linen, Music, Science, Shipbuilding, and Motherhood. He also executed a series of portraits of dignitaries of the Irish Church and when he could not find photographs or illustrations of the subjects, like a true artist, he used, often without their knowledge, individuals he encountered in his daily life. The model for his recording angel was a well-known local journalist, who was not of the Protestant faith. Another model, unbeknown to her, was a girl who passed by the Cathedral every morning. When working on the Motherhood pillar, his model was a woman ‘drawn to the Cathedral like a magnet’. Poor and working-class, she always carried a child in her arms and often offered her opinion on the work in progress. Harding introduced his own figure onto the Arts pillar and in his depiction, the sculptor holds a hammer. At the Belfast Exhibition, Harding exhibited busts such as Jimmy Warnock (1937); Alderman Thomas Henderson, MP (1950) and in 1947, at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, where he had a joint exhibition with W R Gordon, his head of Field-Marshal Lord Montgomery. Other commissions in Belfast included: the front and side chapel reredos for St. Peter’s Church, Antrim Road; the Royal Coat of Arms at Telephone House; Lioness with Cubs over the doorway of the Masonic Hall, Crumlin Road; the Civil Service War Memorial in the Old Parliament Buildings. Coats of Arms at Old Government House, Hillsborough, County Down, for the Duke of Abercorn and Earl Granville, were carved by him. Harding’s last major work was the tomb for the seventh Lord Londonderry, at Mount Stewart, County Down. He was also responsible for Lady Londonderry’s tomb. In 1951 Harding was one of eleven artists invited to exhibit in the Contemporary Ulster Art exhibition held for Festival 1951 at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, and two years later, at the same venue, he was represented in an exhibition of sculpture, organised by Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. He died at home in Church Road, Holywood on 15 January 1964. Harding was elected MRBS in 1913, a member of the Society of Animal Painters in 1921, ARBS in 1923 and was President of the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts and a member of the Royal Hibernian Society. Always closely involved in the artistic life of Northern Ireland, he became an academician of the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1931 and a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in 1932. In 1947 he assumed the presidency of the Ulster Academy, holding office until he retired in 1957 as president of the Royal Ulster Academy. He was awarded the OBE in 1950 and a Civil List Pension. In 1958 he was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree by Queen’s University, Belfast.