1891 - 1949

Sculptor. Born in London, son of a silversmith. He studied at the Northampton Polytechnic, Clerkenwell, the LCC Central School of Arts and Crafts, at the Royal College of Art from 1912, and the Royal Academy Schools from 1915. During World War I he was attached to the Royal Flying Corps as a draughtsman. In 1920 he won the Royal Academy’s Rome scholarship and spent two years at the British School in Rome. 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 déco. 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. In 1938 he modelled impressive bronze lions for Norwich Town Hall, and in 1946 won the Royal Society of British Sculptors gold medal for a fountain (never completed) for the New Council House in Bristol. 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 in 1936 and RA in 1944.