Davide R. Harker paints portraits in oil on linen. He works from the sitter, in natural light, over a period of weeks.
He keeps a studio in the Oltrarno and a second in Battersea. He shows rarely, and accepts four commissions a year. His interest is in the slow accumulation of likeness — what the face does when the sitter has, at last, stopped performing it.
Born in West Sussex, 1984. Resident in Florence since 2005.
Trained at the Charles H. Cecil Studios in the Oltrarno, where he subsequently taught. He paints exclusively from life, in oil on linen, and does not work from photographs.
His portraits are held in private collections in London, Geneva, Antwerp, Milan and Athens. He is represented in London by Levenson Fine Art, and accepts on average four commissions a year.
A selection of recent work will be shown privately in London, late 2026. Viewing by appointment.
La Signora in Verde
Oil on linen · 90 × 70 cm · 2017 · Private collection, Geneva
Ritratto di Signora, all’Olivo
Oil on linen · 120 × 95 cm · 2024 · Private commission
Studio per un Mercante
Oil on panel · 42 × 33 cm · 2014 · Private collection, Antwerp
Notturno, Canal Grande
Oil on linen · 110 × 80 cm · 2020 · Artist’s collection
Selected coverage, 2019 — 2024.
The studio is on the third floor of a building near Santo Spirito. There are no labels on the door. There is, in one corner, a Knole sofa with most of its springs gone, and on the easel a portrait that has been there, Harker concedes, for the better part of a year.
“He paints the way one’s grandfather might have written letters — slowly, by hand, and as though every word might be the last one anyone reads.”
— Vanity Fair, “The Slow Hand”
No gallery, no Instagram, no completed work currently for sale. By every standard measure, Davide R. Harker ought not to have a market. He has, instead, one of the more curious blue-chip secrets in private European collecting — a quiet roster of clients, sustained almost entirely by word of mouth, and a representation arrangement so discreet that even seasoned dealers in St James’s claim not to know the terms of it.
“What he sells, in effect, is time. The portrait is almost a by-product.”
— Anonymous Geneva-based collector, quoted in the FT
Tatler’s annual round-up of artists working in the older European traditions includes, this year, the Sussex-born painter Davide R. Harker — whose recent portrait of an unnamed Greek heiress is said to have required nineteen sittings across two cities.
“If you want to be painted by him, you do not ask. You are introduced. And then, possibly, you wait.”
— Tatler, “The New Old Masters”
The studio is reached by crossing the Ponte Santa Trinita and taking the second turn that isn’t obviously a turn. Inside: raw linen on stretchers, jars of pigment along a windowsill in some private order, and the silence one only really finds in Florence at the end of February.
“I do not believe in the new. The new arrives on its own. The painter’s job is the opposite job.”
— Davide R. Harker, in conversation with Cabana
Sittings take place in person, in Florence or at the sitter’s residence, over a period of between three weeks and several months. The studio reads all enquiries personally and replies in due course.