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Name
Harding, Sylvester
Birth date
1745
Death date
1809
Biography
Sylvester, or Silvester, Harding was born at Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1745, but placed as a child in the care of an uncle in London. At the age of fourteen he left London and ran away with a group of strolling players. Sixteen years later he returned to the capital and took up miniature painting, exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1776 and regularly thereafter until 1802. In 1786 he joined his brother Edward in starting a book and print seller’s shop in Fleet Street, moving six years later to Pall Mall. He specialized in drawing portraits of famous actors and actresses and employed these in such publications as “Shakespeare illustrated by an assemblage of Portraits and Views appropriate to the whole suite of our Author’s Historical Dramas” (1793). He was the father of George Perfect Harding.