Marion Harding

Marion Harding (born 1937, Canada) is one of Canada’s foremost living painters. She is most noted for her blending of music manuscript within her work and painting directly onto wood panels. She is also famous for having modelled for England’s most illustrious artists. Marion’s paintings are in some of the most notable collections around the globe. Her painting ‘Valle Giulia At Dawn’ was presented to His Holiness Pope John Paul II in Vatican City, 2001 and the late physicist Theodore Harold Maiman had many of her paintings in his collection.
Biography
She is the only child of a Russian mother and Irish father. Her parents came to Canada in 1925, with so many others, because of problems in their native lands.They settled in central Canada, the Prairie heartland, and began their lives afresh.
She grew up speaking Russian and English and naturally absorbed the North American multi-cultural environment during her childhood. Following school she qualified as a nurse, painting as time permitted. During the 1960s she moved to Chelsea, London, England where she married Dr. Ernst Friedrich Blumberg, a German descendant of Catherine II of Russia, and later a British lawyer.
It was actually through her first husband that Marion came into contact with Pablo Picasso and spent a summer at Nimes going to bull-fights. Through him also she became a model for the British painter H. Andrew Freeth, R.A. who had become renowned for his famous portraits of Somerset Maugham and Yeats as well as winning the prestigious Prix de Rome. Later, she was painted by the Hungarian artist Arthur Pan who had achieved fame for his superlative portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. Through her first husband, Dr. Ernst Blumberg (son of Dr. Jacob Moritz Blumberg - inventor of The Blumberg sign), she met his uncle Hugo Perls of the Perls Galleries who was a very helpful influence.
After raising a family, she has two grown-up children, she completed a degree in art and then followed up with curatorial work before finally being able to devote herself to full-time painting. Her son Ruan (named after the book by Bryher) was the only Canadian Catechumen and he also later married in the Vatican Parish of St. Anne's as entered into Volume xxx, number 4/99 on the 29th of September 1999.
Many of those who have collected the work of Marion Harding, including her late cousin Peter M. Liba the 22nd Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba, find it not only ironic that her life has always been intertwined with art over the last few decades, in different roles, but also that much of her past experience as a model and her personal knowledge of several celebrated artists comes through within her work.
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