Francis Kyle Gallery

Biography

Douglas Harding, who describes himself as a romantic realist, was born in Surrey in 1941. He studied architecture at Kingston Polytechnic and a fascination with buildings has always pervaded his work. Since 1970 he has lived in Paris, having embarked on a career as a painter without formal training. He regularly travels in the French provinces, sometimes in pursuit of a particular interest he has in railways, conceived occasionally as a focus but more often as a point of departure for his romantic treatment of landscape and urban scenes. In the late 1970s he spent a period on the road in the United States, an experience which continues to surface in his painting.

Harding has participated in public exhibitions in Paris and Rouen, most notably in Le Temps des Gares, a celebration of railway stations from the impressionists to today, shown at the Centre Pompidou and then in London at the Science Museum (1981) as All Stations. He has held one-man exhibitions at Francis Kyle Gallery in 1981 and 1985. In 2006 he participated in a theme exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery; Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and His World by twenty-five painters today.