Jeremiah Pearson Hardy

Jeremiah Pearson Hardy (1800–1888) was a painter who spent most of his career in Bangor, Maine and specialized in portraits. He was next the central figure in a circle of 19th-century Bangor painters that included his daughter, Anna Eliza Hardy (1839–1934), sister Mary Ann Hardy, and pupils Isabel Graham Eaton, Walter Franklin Lansil and George Edward Dale.

Hardy was born in Pelham, New Hampshire but moved to Hampden, Maine, with his parents in 1811. He first studied painting in Boston below David Brown, and next in New York below Samuel F.B. Morse, who was as a consequence the inventor of the telegraph. By 1826 Hardy had moved to Bangor, then a affluent lumber port, and stayed for the get out of of his life, painting portraits of not unaided the local elite but Penobscot Indians, the black barber Abraham Hanson, and members of his own family.

Hardy's artistic style developed snappishly after his initial schooling. In the 1820s, he painted several elegant miniatures and masterful portraits of his parents and prominent citizens. He filled the walls of his Bangor studio subsequently genre paintings, including studies of his relations members painted by candlelight and firelight. By the 1830s, he was painting wealthy Bangor citizens but needed to travel to other parts of the State to locate work. His mature epoch from 1840-1856 is skillfully documented in a ledger he kept of his artistic transactions. Many of the paintings listed yet exist in the Bangor area, particularly in the collections of the Bangor Public Library, Bangor Historical Society, Isaac Farrar Mansion, Bangor Theological Seminary, University of Maine Museum of Art, and the University of Maine's Special Collections at the Fogler Library. By the 1850s, it is sure that the supplementary medium of photography influenced his paintings, and in the 1859-60 Bangor City Directory, Hardy is listed as a portrait painter and photographer following his son Francis. Hardy returned to genre painting in the 1870s, and appears to have painted little in his old age, passing away at age 87 in 1888.

Among his extant works are:

Hardy's brother Jonathan became a rich local fur-trapper, as did Jonathan's son, Manly Hardy. Manly Hardy's daughter (Jeremiah Hardy's grandniece) was the folklorist Fannie Pearson Hardy Eckstorm.

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