Jeremiah Pearson Hardy

Jeremiah Pearson Hardy (1800–1887) was a painter who spent most of his career in Bangor, Maine and specialized in portraits. He was also the central figure in a circle of 19th-century Bangor painters that included his daughter, Anna Eliza Hardy (1839–1934), son Frederick Willard Hardy, sister Mary Ann Hardy, and pupils Walter Franklin Lansil and George Edward Dale.
Hardy was born in Pelham, New Hampshire. He first studied painting in Boston under David Brown, and then in New York under Samuel F.B. Morse, who was also the inventor of the telegraph. By 1826 Hardy had moved to Bangor, then a booming lumber port, and stayed for the rest of his life, painting portraits of not only the local elite but Penobscot Indians, the black barber Abraham Hanson, and members of his own family. Among his extant works are:
The Artists's Rose Garden (1855)
Portrait of Rev. Cyrus Hamlin, D.D.
Portrait of Molly Molasses (Collection of Bangor Public Library)
Portrait of Sarah Molasses (Collection of Bangor Public Library)
Portrait of John Neptune (Collection of Bangor Public Library)
Portrait of Abraham Hanson
Two McLaughlin Pears
A New England Picnic (c. 1855, Collection of Boston Museum of Fine Art)
Catherine Wheeler Hardy and Her Daughter (c. 1842, Collection of Boston Museum of Fine Art)
Hardy's brother Jonathan became a successful 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.